


Hell is Empty (and all the devils are here)

by Bruteaous



Category: Legacies (TV 2018)
Genre: Basically just my headcanons that won't shut up, Eventual Posie, F/F, Gen, Tragedy in a way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-09-29 23:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20444087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bruteaous/pseuds/Bruteaous
Summary: It's not easy growing up as a Park. Memories from Penelope's childhood that taught her life lessons as well as flashbacks to her and Josie's lives before the series. Wrote this mostly for myself, but it's nice to have a history of Penelope and her family to go off of.





	1. Myths Are History

**Author's Note:**

> I want to preface this story, first of all, by staying thank you for even clicking on it. :) It's my weird brain's attempt to give Penelope a powerful witch family with a Legacy that defines the woman she is and the way she behaves. 
> 
> Second, I originally wrote Penelope's maternal grandmother to come from a powerful family of magical/spiritual practitioners descended from the indigenous Minang people of West Sumatra, however, as Lulu is Javanese and the Javanese seem to have a more widely researched mythology, I changed it. Regardless, Penelope's mother is half Indonesian and very proud of her heritage. 
> 
> Caveat: I am not native Indonesian myself. I have Native American ancestry so, while I have great respect for other indigenous cultures around the world, I have researched elements of Indonesian culture, but if I didn't get it right and you know I screwed it up, please, please tell me. I would prefer to know the truth than labor under the delusion that I was right about something I wasn't. 
> 
> I want to be as respectful as possible to Penelope's potential and Lulu's actual heritage. That being said (I notice myself saying that so much after stanning Kaylee), I hope you can enjoy what my crazy brain has come up with. 
> 
> Happy reading! :)

_September 2020_

Achilles Park led the way down the large stone steps, illuminating the 18th century wine cellar beneath Park Manor ahead of the small coterie of children following at his heels.

“Papa, I’m scared,” piped up a small voice from somewhere behind him in the darkness.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, son.” Achilles said, the low and steady timbre of his voice as calming as it always was. “It’s just dark. I’d turn on the overhead lights, but your Uncle Uli says the backup generator’s still out of commission so you’re stuck with me and a lantern.”

“Why did we have to come with you again?” Maia’s obstinate voice replaced her little brother’s squeaky one.

The children followed their father glumly as if to the gallows. Directly behind Achilles walked three of his four children: nine year old Paris—named for the doomed prince of Troy with whom he shared his good looks. Behind him followed seven year old Penelope—cunning and stubbornly determined as her namesake—who was by far Achilles’s favorite, though he would never admit to that if questioned. Bringing up the tail end of the line was fourteen year old Maia, arms crossed in teenage defiance.

When Achilles planted his feet on solid concrete, he turned back and shined the overly bright LED lantern over his children, counting each silently like a duck counting her ducklings. Paris stopped descending when the light blinded him, but Penelope didn’t. The toes of one of her little black clogs caught against one of Paris’s high top converse shoes and then Penelope was free falling through the musty air and semi-darkness. She free fell over the last four steps and rolled to a stop at her father’s feet, yelping in pain as an injured knee collided with the solidness of Achilles’s booted legs.

“Shit!” Achilles cursed.

He dropped unceremoniously to his knees and lifted his youngest daughter up into his arms. There were a few scrapes on her bare elbows, but the biggest injury she’d sustained was a large chunk of exposed flesh on one knee where the skin had been sliced off by jagged bedrock and there was a steady stream of blood pouring down from knee to calf.

“Is she going to be okay, Papa?” Paris asked, fearfully.

“It hurts,” Penelope whimpered, the gold-green eyes that she’d inherited from Achilles’s peering tearily up at him as if beseeching him to take the pain away. “It hurts so much, Papa.”

“I know, darling,” He soothed, wiping a tear from her cheek. “But pain is only temporary. In a moment, you’ll forget all about it.”

Penelope thought that sounded like a lie, but instead of refuting her father, she sniffled indignantly and clung tighter to his waistcoat. Achilles stood, Penelope still cradled in his strong arms as he hefted up the lantern again so he could check over his two remaining children on the stairs.

“Come on,” He commanded softly. “The sooner we get down there, the sooner we can get your mother a crate of her beloved Chablis Grand Cru and go back up to the main house.”

Little Penelope sniffed, hand balling in the soft silk of her father’s overly expensive Italian dress shirt as she willed her tears to stop falling. They had a mission, a not-so-secret, but super important mission to retrieve some fancy wine for her mother’s dinner party that night and Penelope wasn’t going to let a little scrape keep them from doing what they’d come down there to do. 

“I’m ready, Papa,” Penelope said, raising her chin bravely, but not letting go of her dad’s shirt. “Let’s go get Mama’s wine.”

Achilles looked back at his other two children, “You two ready?”

Maia rolled her eyes dramatically, but navigated the last few stone stairs, guiding Paris down by the collar of his polo shirt. They got twenty paces down the damp, dreary slate corridor when the complaining started in earnest. Uncharacteristically, Maia was the one who started it.

“This seems like it would’ve gone a lot faster if it was a one man job, you know, Papa?” Maia quipped in the semi-darkness. “You wouldn’t have had to worry about me or Paris or Penelope getting injured or taking sips of wine behind your back if you’d come down here by yourself. Just saying, you only made more trouble for yourself.”

“It’s tradition, Sweet Pea,” Achilles said. “Our first ancestors to arrive in this country didn’t just carve this sanctuary in the bedrock to store wine, though that’s what it’s used for now.”

“Our first ancestor to arrive in the Massachusetts Bay Colony also accused innocent people of being witches to draw attention away from his own coven and put to death his only daughter for choosing a mortal lover over loyalty to her family. Should we have kept those traditions too?” Maia asked.

Achilles didn’t bother dignifying Maia’s observations with an answer, but continued walking forward down the long, long corridor that held a collection of rare and delicious wines a few of their less infamous ancestors had accumulated over the centuries. White lantern light cascaded over cloned grey walls. The monotonous surroundings changed slightly as lantern light dipped into an alcove in one wall, illuminating eerie shadowy figures that made Paris jump.

“Holy cupcake! What the frick is that?” Paris squeaked, backpedaling into his older sister’s willowy frame.

“Oof—watch where you’re going, Paris! Jesus!”

“Christ, Maia don’t curse!”

“Ouch! Papa, Maia just pushed me!”

“I’ll push you again if you don’t stop being a little tattletale!”

In the chaos, Achilles stopped walking and the lantern made the entire scene of the mosaic that someone had painstakingly laid into the stone alcove sparkle like a handful of precious jewels as he shouted at the children bickering at his heels to stop.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, Penelope was able to take in the scene the tiny pieces of colored glass made up. Two men in ancient armor fought one another, one on the ground, a spear just out of reach as the man standing above him angled his own spear downwards towards his opponent’s heart. Above them, a woman in a golden helmet carrying a spear of her own watched them clash against a backdrop of sand, holding two extra spears in one hand to give to her favorite should his weapon break, and tall stone walls. Beneath the work of art was a carved stone ribbon with the title of the artwork etched into it in large capital letters:

ACHILLES & PRINCE HECTOR FIGHT ON THE FIELD OF TROY

Penelope’s tiny fist yanked on her father’s shirt, gaining his attention and stopping Maia from being grounded for the second time in as many weeks, “Papa, the man on the wall has your name.”

Penelope pointed at the mosaic, but Achilles already knew where his daughter was looking.

“It’s the story of Achilles and Hector. In Greek myth, Achilles was the penultimate hero, second only to Hercules among his contemporaries. He was a skilled killer, impetuous with his emotions, and too proud by half. During the Trojan War, his lover was killed by Prince Hector who was only really defending his homeland, but Achilles didn’t see it that way so he chased Hector down and killed him with the help of wily Athena, the goddess of strategy and cunning.” Achilles explained, “Like all of you, my name was chosen for me by our elders because of the traits I share with my namesake confirmed by different forms of divination.”

His children were quiet then in the wake of this revelation. Though they knew everyone in their father’s family had their names magically chosen for them from the rank and file of Greek mythology, none of them had ever stopped to think _why_ their father’s name had been given to him. But not anymore. Questions hung as heavily in the moist air as potential accusations. Maia wisely kept her opinions to herself, but Paris found it much harder to stop himself from saying things that he ought not to say.

It was his misfortune to have been born earnest in a family of megalomaniacs and master strategists, Maia thought, lamenting her little brother’s poor luck as she intuited the fear rolling off of his small form in waves.

“Have you ever killed someone, Papa?” Paris’s quiet voice echoed in the dark dank space around them like the loudest of gunshots.

With all three of his children scrutinizing him for an answer, Achilles shook his head, shoulders drooping (a sign Penelope would someday come to learn meant her father was lying).

Achilles Park was a complicated individual—more nuanced and unpredictable than his children, even Penelope—would ever give him credit for. Achilles’s view of the world was very different than that of most modern men and his supernatural contemporaries. It hadn’t been shaped by years spent studying at university with a mundane childhood spent in a reliable home like most people’s were or even like his wife’s had been. No, Achilles’s character had been shaped by the violent and unforgiving life experiences that had often meant life or death for him and his siblings in any given situation on a daily basis. He’d gone from being a normal boy—as normal as one could be coming from an ancient and powerful bloodline of witches—one day in a big loving family to then becoming an orphan adrift in exile in the human world who was responsible for the well-being of all of his siblings at the age of nine.

By the time Achilles’s future father-in-law—Dunstan Device—had taken him and his siblings in from the cold, he’d become a fierce protector and leader who relied on his survival instincts and the sparse memories of a once happy home life to govern his family. Penelope’s father was intelligent though too and could be intensely sensitive to the predicament of others and loyal to friends and family. What Achilles was not, however—as his name suggested—was merciful.

His namesake in mythology had been spiteful and vengeful, both qualities Achilles Park shared with him and was proud of. Even though Achilles had long ago come to terms with his various faults and sins, he would never openly admit to his children that he had indeed killed someone—someone who had deserved it—but someone nonetheless.

How could children who grew up in a relatively stable home like his with two parents and a slew of close friends and relatives in a protected community ever understand the trials of an orphan whose parents had been murdered—one of them—right in front of his eyes? It was why Achilles was the man he was, but he didn’t want the same hardness through grief and pain to be impressed upon his children. That’s why he wouldn’t explain to them how his father’s best friend had stabbed him in the back eighteen times one dark night and tossed his body in a river. Or how that same “best friend,” had sent his two brothers to the Park estate the very same night to burn down the manor house with Achilles, his mother, and siblings inside so the entire bloodline would be snuffed out once and for all.

With the help of a neighboring family in their coven—the Elliots—Achilles and his siblings had escaped, but not their mother. She’d sacrificed herself to give her children time to get away and it was because of her that Achilles and his brothers and littlest sister had been able to keep running until they’d left everything comforting and familiar was far behind them. Achilles also wouldn’t confess to his children how angry he had been after finding out that the trial held before their coven’s Circle of Elders for their grandfather’s murderer had been a farce. How Philippi Morell—incidentally also the head of the magical bloodline that had been embroiled in a 400 year long blood feud with the Parks—had been too powerful to be put down even by their coven leader. How Philippi had made sure there were no witnesses to his crime and insisted that his brothers had gone to murder the Park children and their mother of their own free will, hanging them both out to dry.

And—most of all—Achilles would never confess to his children how good it felt when he came back to the coven as a teenager and how satisfying it was to slit Philippi Morell’s throat while he was under house arrest. It was common in blood feuds for a son to return a decade or so later to avenge the loss of parents or siblings so the murder hadn’t been unexpected, but what had not been expected for Achilles was…how much he would enjoy putting an end to the man who’d reigned over his nightmares since the age of nine.

“No, son.” Achilles lied easily, closing his eyes against the image of Philippi Morell’s blank, lifeless eyes and slack open mouth filling with blood. “I’ve never killed anyone. I was named after the Greek hero Achilles because he was prideful, arrogant, and passionate with great fighting skills and the auguries at my birth predicted that I would be the same. Just like you Paris share your looks and easy popularity with Prince Paris of Troy who tempted Helen away from Sparta and you Maia—contrary to your newfound preteen rebelliousness—are a warm hearted nurturer at heart just like the nymph who gave birth to Hermes and raised even some of Zeus’s unrelated bastards out of her own goodness.”

Maia scoffed ‘whatever’ and rolled her eyes while Paris’s ears turned a deep shade of red that was mostly hidden by the shadows of the passage.

But Penelope swallowed and tugged on her father’s shirt to get his attention, “And me, Papa? Where did my came come from?”

“You are named for Penelope, the loyal and steadfast wife of Odysseus. Who spent twenty years waiting patiently for her love to come back to her while at the same time fooling her would-be suitors with her cunning deceptions to buy her husband time enough to return to her.” Achilles said, readjusting the girl in his arms closer to his chest to give his tiring arm muscles a rest, though he made no move to put Penelope down. “When you were born, the elders in our family foresaw that you would share Penelope’s cunning and devotion, but you will also suffer just as she suffered. Don’t worry though, darling, the powers that be make all of us suffer in one way or another.”

Penelope nodded, cuddling against her father’s chest and shivering against the chill in the underground cavern as she struggled to understand the gravity of her father’s words.

“Can we go? This is taking forever!” Maia whined pitifully.

“Maybe the elders should’ve named you Penelope instead, Maia. Then some of her patience might’ve rubbed off on you a little,” Paris snickered, proud of himself.

“And maybe the elders name you after Prince Paris because they foresaw that you’re about to get your ass to handed to you just like he did in front of Troy because if you don’t shut up right now, I swear on every dark object in the world that I will hurt you.”

“Children, stop. We have a chore to do, “Achilles ordered, growing exasperated.

“He started it!”

“No, Maia started it with her complaining!”

“Shush! You’re both being too loud!” Penelope scolded them over her father’s shoulder.

For whatever reason, the condemnation of a seven year old was what finally quieted the quarrelers.

Achilles started down the hallway again, his children following in the light of the lantern, silently this time. Penelope’s knee had stopped hurting, but she didn’t tell her father that. She liked it when he carried her though that was something that was growing less common the older she grew. It was a reminder that—though her parents never made a practice out of telling their children that they loved them because their actions were supposed to speak for them—Penelope’s father did care about her outside of just her being one of his heirs.

There were several more alcoves carved into the walls between shelves of wine bottles and wine barrels with similar mosaics set into them, each one depicting different scenes from Greek myth and legend.

In one, Poseidon stood with his trident upon a chariot being pulled by two seahorses across a vast blue sea. In another, Demeter walked over a barren land mourning the loss of her daughter Persephone to Hades. Lantern light gave temporary life to every face and name only briefly before they were engulfed once again in obscurity.

The one that caught and kept Penelope’s attention was the image of a regale woman sitting in a high backed chair in front of a loom, weaving a dark pattern into vibrant life. Behind the woman, a bunch of rowdy half naked men feasted around a table, spilling wine and laughing, but the woman wasn’t celebrating with them. Instead, she looked maudlin and resigned to her lonely task. It was an act though, Penelope knew, because her namesake had never been a woman who gave up or gave in without a fight.

Beneath it the stone ribbon—like all those before—was carved with the name of the artwork:

PENELOPE FAITHFLLY AWAITING ODYSSEUS’S RETURN FROM TROY

Penelope wanted to study the picture more, but her father was moving too quickly and the mosaic disappeared into blackness as quickly as it had appeared. Eventually, their father drew to a stop in front of a row of steady iron racks bolted to the stone walls.

“Finally!” Maia sighed dramatically, stretching to her full height before planting her hands on her hips and sizing up the shelves that stood taller than her by multiple feet. 

Achilles set Penelope back down onto her feet and eyed the shelves with the same determination as his eldest daughter, “We need at least one crate of Chablis Grand Cru.”

Paris kicked at one of the empty wooden crates stacked beside the shelves and scampered back when the heavy oak box ricocheted, almost toppling over onto him, but no one else was paying attention to him save for Penelope who never missed anything.

“And how are we supposed to find it exactly?” Maia asked, flicking a cobweb off of one dusty bottle.

“The wines are organized by country, then region. Look for the sign that says—wait for it—‘Chablis,’ and go from there,” Achilles deadpanned, causing Penelope and Paris to break into a chorus of giggle as he began to search.

“What color is it?” Maia asked, peering up at a bunch of green glass bottles that all looked the same to the untrained eye.

“A perfectly aged Grand Cru will be light gold in color, but the bottle makes it look more like—”

“Pee!” Paris yelled so excitedly that his small voice echoed back down the corridor and made everyone wince a bit.

Maia and Penelope giggled, but Achilles only rolled his eyes at his son’s antics and continued, “It’s more like a honey color actually.”

After that, they all got down to business and took a shelf to search. Maia squinted up at the dusty iron racks—her gold-green eyes which all of the Park women inherited—glinting dangerously in the lantern light, but she didn’t complain, instead bending low to read the labels scrawled in fluid cursive letters on every shelf. They all rooted through bottles and barrels and carafes before finally it was Maia who cheered in victory and did a rendition of the Snoopy dance that she would’ve been embarrassed for anyone else other than those gathered to witness.

The gold lines in-between the green in Achilles’s eyes glowed in the lantern light as he stooped and hefted up a wooden crate full of bottles.

“No need to thank me,” Maia piped up, crossing her arms over her chest as her father and siblings continued back the way they’d come in the first place. Maia would’ve waited for them to realize she was gone in any other circumstance, but the dark closing in around her fed a primal fear that she usually didn’t feel so she raced after them, almost knocking Penelope over before lifting the girl up in a piggyback ride so she didn’t have to limp along on her injured leg.

The things she did for love.


	2. Love at First Sight Isn't Always A Thing & Moms See Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So we went back in time from last chapter two years or so. Penelope and Josie meet as small, small children though it's not love at first sight so much.
> 
> Josie is about 4 and Penelope is 5

_February 2018_

“Daddy, where are we?”

The voice belonged to the small blonde hanging onto one of Alaric Saltzman’s hands like a lifeline. The other hand was in the grip of a similarly small brunette who remained quiet, staring around the large stone foyer they’d just been ushered into by a butler. The room was so big and the doors so tall that the brunette—Josie—could imagine that they had been built by giants not normal people. Did a family of giants live here served by a human sized and associated house staff?

Alaric—for his part—was just as floored as his daughter by the vast richness of the house he’d pulled up to after following his GPS to the address his mother had given him from one of her beloved address books. Thank whatever forces ran the universe for June Cleaver housewives and their fastidiousness when it came to sending out holiday and thank you cards. Alaric’s relationship with his normal Baby-Boomer parents wasn’t close, but he trusted them enough to go to Boston after the debacle with Seline kidnapping the twins and Cade wanting to enslave them because he needed a place to sort his thoughts. Once he’d done that, Alaric had realized that he needed to get the girls to a safer place than staying with his very human, very well-meaning, but vulnerable parents. Then he’d remembered Achilles and his siblings. The Saltzmans were kind people and Diane Saltzman—in particular—had a tendency to adopt strays.

She’d found Achilles and his siblings sleeping in an alleyway cuddled together like puppies while walking to the Farmer’s Market one morning and she’d brought them home right away, finally having enough hungry mouths to keep up with her love of cooking gigantic meals. The Parks had stayed with Alaric and his sister for a little less than a year until a permanent guardian could be found for them and in that time Alaric—who’d only had an older sister up to that point—had learned what it was like to have brothers, for better or worse. He’d seen Achilles the last time when he’d been invited to the man’s wedding a decade back, but other than that they hadn’t kept in touch. The same couldn’t be said for the Parks and Diane Saltzman apparently. Reaching out randomly had been a gamble, but one that had paid off and Alaric was glad Achilles was willing to return the favor of his mother’s kindness just when he and his girls needed it most.

He’d known Achilles was rich because his wedding was fancy and at a mansion on Martha's Vineyard, but Alaric hadn’t thought the Parks were Richie Rich-rich until now. Still, Alaric hadn’t been expecting…well…this.

“Daddy!” the blonde girl whined loudly, yanking on Alaric’s arm.

“Shh, Elizabeth,” he soothed, squeezing the small blonde’s hand reassuringly. “We’re in the home of an old friend of daddy’s family.”

“Is this friend a giant?” Josie piped up from Alaric’s other side with sudden interest.

Alaric was studying a tapestry on one wall that had a poem on it he swore he’d heard before. The academic in him had to read it before he could do anything else. In long flowing black script it read:

In the coven of the Five Pointed Star,

Five families equal in power are.

The Parks are ruthless and evil;

Crossing them is always lethal.

The Elliots are fair and loyal;

And as helpful as pennyroyal.

The Devices are sharp and cunning;

From their plans you should be running.

Wealthy and steadfast are the Morells;

They will pull you with them down to hell.

The Le Mares are as changeable as the sea;

Be warned, better leave them be.

These Five families equal in power are;

In the coven of the Five Pointed Star.

“What was that, sweetheart?” Alaric asked as the couplets were tucked away into his short term memory for future examination.

Josie felt her ears heat up as the attention of both her dad and her twin focused entirely upon her.

“Um…I…um…I asked if your friend was a giant?” Josie repeated in a small voice.

“Not…that I know of,” Alaric answered uncertainly as he ran back through the memories of his childhood and the oddly named boys who’d become like his little support gang for the better part of a year. “I haven’t seen him in ten plus years though, honey, so he might be now. I really, don’t know.”

Josie seemed satisfied with that answer for the moment, but Lizzie narrowed her blue eyes at her sister and Josie—feeling suddenly self-conscious—looked away.

“Giants aren’t real,” Lizzie declared with an air of superiority.

Josie surprised herself by finding the courage to argue back, “You don’t know that.”

“Do too!” Lizzie’s voice turned up in volume, ricocheting off of the stone walls as they wandered from the foyer into a large circular room that was white and not grey stone with a second floor railing above the center that branched out into two arched walnut staircases which wove down both walls like equal sides of a symmetrical horseshoe.

The only thing standing in the way of a back and forth volley of, “Do toos,” and, “Do nots,” was the sudden eruption of childish laughter and the rapid patter of small feet against the hardwood floor. The three Saltzmans’ attention shifted as two tiny human blurs skidded through the arched doorway to the sitting room adjoining the foyer and ran around an overstuffed French sofa.

“I’m going to get you!”

“You’re too slow!”

A little girl with shoulder length black hair raced around the sofa followed by a slightly shorter boy with matching shorter hair at her heels. Neither one of them seemed to notice the strangers in the middle of the foyer, so preoccupied were they with catching or evading the other. Lizzie leaned her head around Alaric’s legs just as Josie did the same, both equally confused by the scene. Josie watched as the girl climbed up onto the sofa to stand precariously on the back of it.

The dark haired boy stopped running then and attempted to leap up on his short legs, but try and try as he did, he couldn’t reach the girl from the back of the sofa.

_Definitely not giants_, Josie thought, sure of that much so far.

“Ha, ha,” The girl taunted from the relative safety of her high perch. “You can’t reach me, Paris!”

“That isn’t fair, Penny!” the boy pouted. “It’s against the rules to use the furniture!”

“No,” the girl—Penny—corrected waving a self-righteous finger in the air above the boy’s head. “There are no rules, remember? That’s what Papa said.”

The boy deflated physically for a second until he got an idea. Paris whispered something in another language that sounded a bit like the spell Seline had taught Josie and Lizzie during their brief road trip together, but it didn’t set anything on fire. Instead, the words caused the boy who said them to begin to levitate a few inches off of the ground.

“Hey!” Penny cried.

“Ha, ha!” Paris squealed victoriously.

He vaulted forward and the girl dodged him as he reached out almost touching her shoulder, but she managed to scramble awkwardly to the edge of the couch where she balanced shakily. Then the girl looked up and fearful gold-green eyes met deep startled brown. The eye contact didn’t last long, however, breaking as one of the raven haired girl’s feet slipped on the upholstery. Then she was suddenly falling with alarming speed towards the expensive walnut flooring, but she never connected with the hardwood. Instead, the girl hovered briefly in mid air until a pair of different arms scooped her up and their owner blew a raspberry into the exposed skin of Penny’s belly.

A tall teenager had slid into the room and was holding Penny up now, blowing another loud and messy raspberry against the girl’s stomach as she giggled. Josie was captivated by the sight as the raven haired girl was held aloft by the newly arrived teenage girl with long black locks and an easy smile that was warm and inviting. Paris—the boy’s feet back on solid ground—raced to the new girl, clinging to her for attention as she began to spin around with Penny in her arms.

_Penny_, Josie thought, _That was a pretty name, but kind of weird. I mean, who names their kid after money? _She didn’t know any kids named Dollar or Quarter at the school she and Lizzie had been in until Lizzie had accidentally set something on fire.

The teenager only twirled once around until she caught sight of the three strangers in the foyer and stopped in her tracks.

“Oh…Hi,” She said uncertainly. Her expression cycled through a few different emotions before she set the girl in her arms down and took a few steps up to the Saltzmans with growing recognition. “You must be Ric Saltzman, right? Our Papa told us you would be coming to stay with us. I’m Maia, Maia Park, Achilles’s eldest daughter.”

Alaric shook the offered hand politely, recognizing the girl now somewhat. She had Achilles’s off-putting gold-green eyes, but the beautiful smile and darker features of her mother, Nora Device, the woman he’d made Isobel travel over 800 miles with him by car to watch Achilles marry in Martha’s Vineyard a summer day that seemed so long ago now. Like it was part of another life.

“This little devil,” Maia continued, pulling Penelope back towards her and disentangling herself from Paris. “Is my little sister Penelope and this hellion is my little brother Paris. They can be annoying, but I love them anyway.”

“Nice to finally meet all of you,” Alaric nodded, reclaiming the hands of his daughters as he looked between the two of them. “These are my daughters, Lizzie and Josie.”

Penelope visibly perked up at the introductions, but nether one of the Saltzman girls, who had to be close to her in age, bothered to greet her or her siblings. Penelope wasn’t offended though. Not everyone felt comfortable enough to talk to strangers they’d just met and these people didn’t seem like a friendly bunch. As if to backup her assumption, the blonde one—Lizzie, Penelope guessed—stared the other girl down as if daring Penelope to actually engage anyone in her family in conversation. The brunette at Alaric's other side that Penelope had noticed earlier wasn’t being standoffish or unfriendly though, merely shy and using her father as cover. Josie chose that moment to peek out from behind the safety of her father’s leg, obviously curious despite her fear.

Paris—too trusting and gregarious as always—was already approaching Josie and seemed sagely to want to stay away from Lizzie, but before he could ask Josie if she wanted to play tag with them, the blonde girl stepped in front of the brunette protectively.

“What do you want?” the blonde asked rudely.

“Elizabeth!” Alaric scolded, but that was as far as his admonishment of the girl went.

He wasn’t as decisive in his parenting as Penelope’s own father was with them and she found that disconcerting for some reason.

Lizzie crossed her arms over her chest looking up at her father and then down at her feet while Josie stood behind her saying nothing and poor Paris backed away, quietly regretting his forwardness. Penelope’s shoulders straightened. No one, made her big brother feel bad about himself, but her. Being able to push a Park around was a privilege, not a right, and it was something only she and her siblings were allowed to do. Watching Paris suffer though wasn’t fun for Penelope if she wasn’t the one who’d caused the suffering in the first place.

Without a word, Penelope walked right up to the blonde and mirrored her defensive posture, eyeing her up and down. Yeah, she could definitely take this girl down in a vicious game of tag if she had to. Even after having just met the blonde, Penelope was already able to discern—using the people reading skills her mother had taught her—that Lizzie Saltzman was all bark, no actual bite. She might’ve tested that theory, but before Penelope could do that she felt a foot tap her leg and turned around to see Maia mouthing, ‘Be nice,’ at her.

Penelope was seriously considering making fun of the overly aggressive blonde anyway when she heard footsteps coming down one of the staircases behind them calmly.

“Ric!” her father’s voice rang clearly through the room as he descended the staircase in one of his tailored Brioni suits. “As I live and breathe.”

Alaric Saltzman’s expression rose into a forced polite smile that—if Penelope hadn’t been taught to see through—she would’ve believed was genuine as her father's was right now, walking confidently forward and enveloping the other man in a hug that made Josie and Lizzie look at one another in confusion. The hug was short and Achilles stepped back to a respectable distance after, planting his hands on his hips.

“It’s good to see you,” he continued, smiling almost boyishly. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen you since my wedding fifteen or so years ago. It feels like yesterday that your parents posed with Nora and I in our wedding photos.”

While Alaric looked surprised like he didn’t know what to do with himself, Penelope’s father looked younger with an easy light in his eyes that he usually didn’t have. Who knew her dad had friends? Penelope reflected. She’d never met any of them. The only people who came to the house who weren’t family were business associates of her mother’s and father’s, but never actual friends. Parks didn’t trust anyone enough to have friends.

“Yeah, my mom still talks about that red velvet wedding cake with rum cream frosting in-between the layers,” Alaric said, shrugging.

“Yeah, that was a good day,” Achilles agreed, hands settling into his pockets as he struggled to find things to talk about. “And these two?”

“Ah, these are my daughters, Lizzie and Josie.”

“You’re wife…,” Achilles snapped his fingers absently, trying to remember something, then he stopped and met Alaric’s gaze. “Isobel, right? How is she?”

Alaric’s expression went blank for a second and his face lost all of its color as he rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously.

“Uh, Isobel and I…we couldn’t make it work,” Alaric said, glumly. “I married a second time, the woman of my dreams, but she died…these are our girls.”

Achilles opened his mouth to immediately apologize for the faux pas, but before he could, he was interrupted.

“Who’s Isobel?” Josie asked, her voice sounding loud in the wide open foyer.

Alaric met her expectant gaze and faltered, sighing when no words came out of his mouth. The scene would’ve grown far more awkward if Penelope’s mother hadn’t chose that moment to saunter down the opposite staircase her husband had come down.

“Alaric Saltzman,” Nora Park’s smooth silky voice suddenly had the attention of everyone in the room as she descended in a simple black dress and not so simple Prada heels. “I thought I heard that sexy deep voice again. A woman never forgets a voice like that.”

When Penelope’s mother hugged Alaric he seemed less uncomfortable than when her father had embraced him, but he looked embarrassed when she released him just as quickly and moved to stand beside her husband. One of Nora’s hands came to rest in the crook of Achilles’s elbow naturally as she took it upon herself to save the conversation.

“What brings you here, Ric?” She asked. 

“Yes, you mentioned trouble of some kind over the phone?” Achilles added.

Alaric’s hands slipped into his pockets as he stood, wondering what exactly he could and should tell these people and what was best kept to himself.

“My girls and I…”Alaric began, looking down at his daughters who were surprisingly paying attention to him just when he didn’t want them to. “…let’s just say we’ve made some powerful enemies and need someplace safe to lay low and you two are the most powerful witches I know so I thought it was time for a visit.”

Nora narrowed her eyes, expecting more, but Achilles seemed to accept the explanation at face value, understanding that there were likely details Alaric didn’t feel comfortable sharing in front of the children present.

“How nice of you to think of us after all of this time,” Nora said, in that tone that Penelope recognized as the polite falsetto she used to put people at east just before she lured them in for the verbal kill. Before Nora could do so though, Achilles covered her hand on his arm with his own. Their eyes met in some sort of silent communication Penelope didn’t understand.

“Ric, you and your girls are welcome here for as long as you want to stay,” Achilles said, staring around at the vast walls and high ceiling. “We have twenty guest rooms that very seldom get used so it’ll be nice to have someone giving some of them a purpose.”

Achilles removed Nora’s hand from his arm then and took a step forward, gripping Alaric’s shoulder tightly and meeting his gaze with sudden intensity.

“And be rest assured, we will deal with whomever or whatever is after you and your daughters,” Achilles said, his voice heartfelt and serious. “I told you once, Ric, you’re like a brother to me and that’s never changed. The thing about having brothers in my family is that your enemies are my enemies too just by the nature of our association to one another. While your girls enjoy exploring the house with Nora and our kids, you and I will go down to our coven leader’s compound. Albion Elliot is a mystic centenarian who has seen and fought more weird shit than I can imagine. If anyone will know how to help you and your girls out, it’s that old bastard.”

Alaric nodded gratefully, but his daughters suddenly clung to the sides of his jeans very aware that he was about to leave them with strangers…again. The twins' attention shifted when Maia--intuiting their fear--knelt in front of them though, smiling that welcoming smile she’d worn since they met her.

“Do you guys like trampolines?”

“Yeah!” Lizzie and Josie piped up simultaneously, fear forgotten in their sudden excitement.

“We have one in the indoor gymnasium down the hall. Do you guys want to go check it out?” Maia asked.

“Yeah!” The twins cheered louder.

Maia winked at Alaric and her father before leading the way through the sitting room Penelope and Paris had been chasing each other in and out into a corridor with Josie and Lizzie racing after her heels. Just before disappearing through the doorway and out of sight though, Josie turned around and looked back at them. Her eyes met Penelope’s—again curious—before landing back on her dad.

“Go on, have fun,” Alaric encouraged.

Josie nodded and raced out of sight down the corridor after her sister and Penelope’s. Penelope herself remained standing next to her brother with her arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t like playing with other kids her age as much as she did puzzling through and eavesdropping on adults and their strange lives. She would’ve stayed there though Paris looked like he was regretting not following after Maia when he had the chance, but their mother snapped her fingers in front of their faces, drawing their attention sharply to her.

“Children, I think Mae’s preparing Es doger in the kitchen for a special treat for our guests." Nora said. “If you two would be lambs and go help her out, she might see her way to giving each one of you a double helping.”

Paris’s eyes grew wide and he raced for all he was worth back through the main corridor under the stairs that would lead into a warren of hallways that would eventually deliver him to the kitchens. Penelope—though—hesitated, eyeing her mother wearily. Nora’s tone had made it clear that what she was asking them to do wasn’t actually a _choice_, but Paris had been too focused on his dreams of shaved ice and sweetened coconut milk to notice. She wanted to stay. Clearly, there was something else going on here. Something that was about to get said that she wasn’t allowed to know and those were Penelope’s favorite things to listen to.

When her mother’s eyes narrowed down at her belittling her smile, Penelope knew it would be safer for her to follow Paris than risk getting in trouble with her mother right now. Rolling her eyes, Penelope sauntered down the main corridor, turning around once at the doorway to see if she could get away with lingering and meeting the dark, suspicious gaze of her mother.

_Dang it._

Penelope relented, racing towards the kitchens and hoping Paris hadn't been stupid enough to eat her share of the dessert.


	3. Actual Love at Second Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penelope comes to Salvatore and meets Josie for a second time. The two don't really know one another as after Alaric left Park Manor the first time, he didn't keep in contact with the Parks, but Josie and Penelope definitely recognize something in one another.
> 
> Also going to be listing Penelope and Josie's ages at the start of every chapter, I think that will help with the time jumping around. Penelope is 14 in this chapter and Josie is 13.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I wanted to clear up some confusion on timelines. I think the show Legacies was supposed to start in 2028, but with the twins being born in 2014, the timing doesn't really make sense as they would've been fourteen with the show started. Therefore I have a head canon that the show is actually taking place in 2029/2030. Penelope is at least a few months older than Josie because she's sixteen at the beginning of season one so she was likely born in winter of 2013 since the twins birthday is in March so if she came to the school at 14 then the year was probably 2027? Ugh time. 
> 
> Anyway, enough about that, go read if you want. Thanks :)

_August 2027_

It had all started back on one late summer day when the fourteen year old Penelope had arrived on the campus of the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted for the first time. The school itself—situated in a colonial mansion which had apparently used to belong to one of the founding families of the surrounding town according to all the brochures—gave off serious X-men vibes. Both Penelope and her sixteen year old brother, Paris, could agree on that at least.

“Do you think an X-Jet might pop up through the tennis courts at any moment?” Paris ventured almost hopefully with a smirk that belied the apparent innocence of the question.

He was taller than his sister, not quite lanky and—like his namesake in Greek mythology—he was darkly handsome in a way that would likely make many of Penelope’s classmates, no matter how they identified, swoon unnecessarily.

“We should be so lucky,” Penelope mumbled, humoring him.

She was distracted by the throngs of students of varying ages moving back and forth through the halls around their small group made up of the Headmistress Caroline Forbes, Penelope’s brother, her parents, and another prospective family who were also taking the orientation tour with a small curly haired boy. Absently Penelope catalogued the various traits, gestures, and facial expressions of the teens and teachers who passed her by, filing them away in her eidetic memory to be referenced later when she might need them. 

“At the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted we are big on spirit. Education is our first priority, obviously. We’ve sent students to the Ivy League; to Silicon Valley. Of course, if you are looking for a more unique course of study, I assure you, we are unmatched. We believe in inclusive blending of the species here so outside of full moons, vampires, witches, and werewolves all cohabitate peacefully…”

The perky voice of the blonde headmistress was beginning to give Penelope a headache as the impeccable woman—who had to have been 100% a cheerleader in a past life, Penelope surmised—effused about the merits of her school. From the looks of it, the brunette’s parents were also bored by the whole display, though Penelope’s mother tried valiantly not to show it. Had Penelope not been her mother’s daughter, she would’ve read interest in those vigilant dark eyes and easily smiling mouth instead of ennui and the underlying derision that gave her mother’s life meaning. Penelope’s father—for his part—couldn’t seem to be able to focus his attention on one spot, his green-gold eyes shifting from every person and thing in the rooms as he tried to appear somewhat excited to see Alaric’s long held dream come true.

And Paris was—Paris.

Penelope had never met a more genuine and open human being than her brother. Sometimes she wished he’d been born into another family—not because Penelope didn’t want him as a brother—but because Paris deserved better than being lumped into Achilles and Nora Park’s abominable, “devil’s brood.” Their family had a reputation in the supernatural world for being ruthless and evil. The Parks weren’t good people—except for Paris—and they weren’t raised to be. The Parks had made it their jobs to make many, many enemies pursuing their selfish ambitions over the centuries and Paris—just like Penelope—had inherited all of those enemies the moment she sucked in her first breath.

Theirs was a deadly legacy of 2,000 years of bloodthirsty and sadistic treatment of anyone who wasn’t them. It was almost guaranteed that some descendant of this feud or that vendetta would try to get close to either Penelope or Paris until they were directly poised to take their revenge on the evil Park family. Penelope wasn’t worried for herself though; she could take it, but Paris—who wore his heart on the outside of his chest like a bullseye—wouldn’t survive such a betrayal. 

Literally.

“Penny?” Paris’s voice broke into her consciousness. “Earth to Penny!”

Penelope smacked away the hand waving itself in front of her line of vision.

“Where did you go?” Paris asked, thoughtfully.

Penelope shrugged, re-familiarizing herself with the dark paneled wood walls surrounding her, “Nowhere apparently.”

“It’s going to be okay. Just because our mom wants to shore up her investment in this place by sending you here doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. You do know that right?”

Penelope ignored the concerned brown orbs that were staring at her profile, expecting some sort of reassurance that would never come, “Spare me your optimistic platitudes today. I don’t have the patience for them. The truth is that it probably won’t be okay, but we will be. We’re Parks and—despite the best efforts of the world around us—we tend to survive whatever’s coming for us whether or not it’s the smart thing to do.”

Paris’s seemingly hurt expression morphed with the speed of liquid mercury into a debonair one, eyes sparkling with a cheeky light that made him look like a member of their family for the first time that day, “You have such a sweet and sunny disposition, little sister.”

Penelope shrugged again, “That’s why you love me.”

Paris clasped his hands behind his back and let his shoulders fall a little; adopting the posture an alert yet relaxed man though his voice when he spoke was serious.

“No, I love you because you’re my sister and you always have my back no matter what.”

Penelope wasn’t ready to counter such genuine honesty in a meaningful way so she did what she usually did when she didn’t want to deal with the emotions of others: she deflected. The signature smirk she’d spent her entire early life perfecting dominated her facial features into the echo of a classic mean girl.

“And one day,” Penelope replied almost merrily, copying her brother’s posture. “You’ll have to repay me for that devotion. I never do anything for nothing.”

Her brother’s face scrunched up like he’d eaten something sour for a second, then grinned, but before he could utter a snarky response, their mother stared over her shoulder at them. Her dark eyes—like molten lava—promised threats and future misfortunes to come upon her children if they both didn’t shut up and pay attention. The siblings were quiet after that. Penelope went back to examining the nuances of her environment and Paris tried not to look too chagrined as he pretended to do the same.

Then it happened. Penelope saw _her_.

Penelope had never believed in serendipity or fate or any of the conventional belief systems that allowed people to rationalize their existences so they could continue laboring under the delusion that there was some sort of order or direction to their lives. She’d learned a long time ago that it was better to accept the fact that life was chaos. Existence wasn’t a thing—it wasn’t propelled by an unseen force—it was a medium. It conducted events and behaviors the same way water conducted electricity into a chain reaction of electrically charged particles stuck in a perpetual loop of cause and effect, but none of that could explain this moment. Nothing in Penelope’s life had prepared her for standing in the middle of the Stefan Salvatore Memorial Library, completely entranced by a girl she didn’t know and had no reason to like. Even the pragmatism that Penelope had adopted in order to make survival as a Park in a hostile world easier couldn’t explain _her_.

Her—the girl in question—sat at a table in the library the headmistress had stopped the tour group in. The over eager blonde was saying something about one of the infamous Salvatore brothers, but Penelope tuned her out as she watched the seated brunette read the book in front of her with a focus that was seldom seen in students reading something because they had to for a class. She was lanky, athletic in a way that was subtle, and—given the length of her arms and legs—likely taller than Penelope was when she stood at full height. The brunette’s unrestrained hair streaming down her neck to her shoulders was a dull shade of salt oak brown, but it shimmered in the sunlight coming in through the window with a luster that seemed to absorb the golden glow of the star upon which all life on earth depended, not just reflect it.

The brunette’s skin was pale, but not unhealthily so. As she read, she leaned over her book on the table, nibbling on a thumbnail absently as she pondered over whatever topics she was learning about. The girl’s face wasn’t conventionally beautiful in the vein of 1930s movie stars, but she was classically attractive in the way of a Michelangelo or Botticelli masterpiece and Penelope found herself wanting to get to know the other girl better.

Penelope stopped dead in her tracks and for a moment she even stopped breathing as her attention zeroed in on the girl who’d suddenly become everything important in her world for a reason not even Penelope could puzzle out.

“Today must be a day for firsts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the legendary Penelope Park at a loss for words over a girl.”

Paris brought Penelope hurdling out of her own thoughts, throwing an arm loosely across her shoulders and leaning closer to whisper conspiratorially into his little sister’s ear.

“Someone might get the impression that you’re suddenly smitten.”

Penelope shrugged off her brother’s arm harshly, her expression darkening. “Yeah, yeah, and it makes me look weak, I know.”

“On the contrary to what our parents seem to believe, I’ve found that what they term as a ‘weakness’ can be a symptom of something, but it’s not a disease. No, there’s only one cure for an affliction of the heart like yours, little sister, and that’s audacity. I’ll distract Perseus and his gorgon while you go charm your Andromeda.”

Paris winked at her and turned back to follow the tour group, which was beginning to move back out into the corridor. Penelope huffed as she was shoved not unkindly in the beautiful brunette’s direction, with her brother’s whispered voice lingering in the air after her, “Fortune favors the bold.”

The urge to turn back around and punch Paris in the face was strong, but it left Penelope’s limbs when she caught the attention of a pair of soft doe eyes gazing at her curiously from across the room before ducking bashfully away.

Screw it, Penelope thought. She was invested now. Taking a deep breath, Penelope sauntered her way calmly across the library. More eyes than just the cute brunette’s paid attention to her movements, but there was only one pair that Penelope was concerned about—a pair of doe eyes that widened comically when their owner realized that Penelope was walking towards her.

“What are you reading?” Penelope asked easily, leaning over the dark oak table, close enough to see the lines of dark brown accenting the swirling honey brown around the other girl’s pupils. It must be pretty good if you’re that absorbed in it.”

The brunette looked down, then back up, a dazzling smile lighting up her face as she brushed a lock of shoulder length hair behind one ear nervously. “Ah, yeah, I guess.”

Penelope raised her eyebrows as the girl in front of her closed the book and angled it towards her enough so the other witch could read the gold lettering on the cover.

The Pyromancer’s Inferno: The Essential Guide to Enchantments, Advanced Charms, and All Things Fire Magic by Vindictus Baelfire.

Penelope’s smile shifted into a smirk as she leaned a hip against the table, green eyes flaring with gold in the afternoon sunlight, “You know, my mom is fond of saying that, ‘every self-respecting woman needs to know how to throw a decent fireball if she’s going to lead a full life.’ She and that author would be great drinking buddies. I’m Penelope; Penelope Park.”

The brunette’s smile widened, lighting up the room in a way fire never could and extending a smooth hand out to Penelope to shake, “I’m Josie Saltzman. Are you new?”

Their hands clasped together and Penelope found that she was loathe to let it go, but she did easily when Josie began to pull away. Then Penelope rolled her shoulders casually and pulled the chair next to Josie out far enough to sit down in, “I will be when school starts. What about you? Have you been at this school long?”

Josie giggled, looking down at the table briefly, and then back up at Penelope; looking at the raven haired other witch like she was the responsible for hanging the stars in the sky. Penelope was determined to be on the receiving end of that look as often as possible in the future.

“As long as it’s been here,” Josie replied kindly. “My parents founded the school so my sister and I would have a safe place to learn.”

Penelope’s eyebrows rose in a look of controlled confusion, “the blonde headmistress who could replace the entire cast of _Bring it On_ and play every part with energy to spare is your mom? Huh, I wasn’t expecting that. I guess that would also mean that Dr. Saltzman is your dad?”

“Was it the name that gave me away?”

Penelope’s grin widened and her chest felt weightless as though her heart was floating in the air without a body to support it. She couldn’t remember a time in her recent life where she’d felt so genuinely happy and unguarded in the company of another person let alone this attractive near stranger.

“You’re funny, Josie Saltzman. Does anyone ever tell you that?”

Josie looked bashfully down at her hands which were now folded over top of the book she’d forsaken in favor of Penelope. When Josie met Penelope’s eyes again, the happy glimmer in them had dulled somewhat.

“Not really,” Josie shook her head. “My sister is the more outgoing out of the two of us. She thrives in the spotlight and I am okay with letting her have that.”

There was something in the way the brunette said those words that didn’t ring completely true to Penelope, but she filed away the information for future discussion.

“Do you have any siblings?”

Penelope chuckled, but nodded her head, “Too many. Three brothers. Two older and one younger. The one who’s closest to me in age—Paris—is on tour keeping our parents occupied so I could wander off. My eldest brother is in his twenties and the youngest is still living at home with my parents for now.”

“Wow,” Josie commented, leaning her chin on her hand as her eyes seemed to be taking in Penelope’s features all over again as if for the first time. “That’s cool. My mom—well—my biological mom came from a large family with a lot of brothers and sisters, but my dad and my mom who raised me are both from small families. Is it hard?”

“Having so many brothers?” Penelope elaborated and Josie nodded. “No, not really. Aside from Paris, who I can’t seem to get rid of sometimes, we all tend to keep to ourselves mostly. What about you? Is it hard having a twin?”

For the first time since they’d met, Josie’s expression became closed off for a moment as she eyed Penelope with a newfound weariness, “How do you know we’re twins?”

Penelope smiled easily, hoping to put an end to Josie’s apparent suspicions once and for all, “Your mom was leading our orientation tour. When we were in the dormitories for witches, she mentioned how her, ‘twins thrived here.’ Then you said you had a sister and I put the two together.”

The tension that had bloomed suddenly in Josie’s shoulders released almost immediately and the accusation fled from her expression, leaving behind a sense of obvious guilt on the other girl’s features. _She’s used to being hunted_, Penelope realized silently, _or maybe she’s just very protective of her family_.

“I’m sorry,” Josie said, biting her lip in a way that was as distracting to Penelope as the way the brunette tucked more loose strands of hair behind one ear in what the raven haired girl was beginning to realize was a nervous gesture. “It’s just…Lizzie and I…we’re all we have. We depend on each other and we protect one another. The coven we’re descended from was…massacred…before we were born and we—we’re just really protective of ourselves and our parents, I guess.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, Josie,” Penelope shook her head, gaze filled with empathy. “My family—let’s just say we aren’t the most well liked of people and it’s totally our fault. My parents often treat anyone who isn’t one of us like an enemy even when they’ve been proven otherwise. As children, my brothers and I were taught that sometimes the best defense is always being ready to go on the offensive. In my family, we have contingency plans for our contingency plans. It’s exhausting, but necessary.”

Josie nodded, still biting her lip self-consciously, “I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that to another person before. I’m sure you didn’t come all the way over here to talk to me just for me to unload all of my baggage on you.”

“I have wheels on my luggage,” Penelope said, trying to steer them away from the seriousness that had settled over them. “Makes it easier to push my baggage on other people if I need to.”

Josie’s smile grew and became genuine again, “And here I thought you were too beautiful to have much baggage.”

“Beautiful people have the most baggage, just look at the people on _America’s Next Top Model?_ That’s the rule though and there are exceptions to it, like you.”

Josie’s cheeks pinkened as she blushed, but she didn’t break eye contact which told Penelope that this girl may not be as shy as she let on under the congenial exterior, “You’re funny, Penelope Park.”

Penelope’s trademark smirk lost its aloofness as it transformed into another honest smile that it seemed only Josie Saltzman was capable of bringing out in her. If anyone had ever told the raven haired witch that she’d find herself betraying the austere Sun Tzu style conditioning her parents had drummed into her head in favor of an easily beautiful smile and a softly encouraging brown gaze, Penelope would’ve laughed them out of her life, but that was exactly what was happening and Penelope found that she was content with the reservation that she wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, I've been made aware that there is some confusion concerning Penelope not mentioning that she has a sister when she talks about her family to Josie. That has to do with something that happens in the past...to Maia, which effects everyone even influencing Pen's eventual relationship with Josie. Hopefully I get it written soon.


	4. Love is Scary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penelope's first lesson on love. Penelope is 7 years old, Maia is 14.

_November 2020_

Love was one of those things that Penelope Park was sure she’d never fully understand. Growing up, she’d had no doubt that love could be a wondrous thing sometimes, but if her parents’ famously quarrelsome and passionate relationship was anything to go by, it could also be a difficult pain in the ass that could cause as much misery as good if not more so.

For as long as Penelope could remember, Achilles and Nora Park had fought in front of their children on the regular sometimes belittling one another until one of them gave in. Unlike their brothers, Maia—who was an empath and the most sensitive to emotion in their family—was convinced despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that their parents still love one another deeply even at their worst moments.

One stormy autumn night, Penelope wandered out of her room because of a nightmare and heard shouting coming from one of the first floor sitting rooms. Naturally, she’d gone to investigate and had found Maia sitting Indian-style on the second floor landing of one of the double staircases in the foyer, fighting off tears as she watched their parents shout at one another so loud that it almost drowned out the thunder and the whipping wind against the side of the house outside.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Maia scolded half-heartedly in a whisper once she caught sight of her little sister padding towards her in overstuffed cat slippers. “Go back to bed, Penelope. There’s nothing to see here.”

Ignoring her—as Maia was obviously lying and badly—Penelope plopped down Indian-style in front of the bannister, almost like Maia’s smaller shadow.

“Then why are you out here?” Penelope whispered loudly then yawned.

“Because,” Maia defended stubbornly.

“Because why?”

“Just because, Penelope.”

“That’s a stupid reason,” Penelope chided sagely as if she were the older sister here and not Maia.

Maia sighed in frustration, “Go back to bed, Penny.”

“No,” Penelope refused calmly. “You’re not our mom. You can’t tell me what to do.”

Maia only glared back in answer and said nothing as Penelope snuggled up to her side and leaned against her shoulder in victory.

Their actual mother’s voice rose shrilly up from below, only the words, “Elliot,” “Medusa,” and “stupid idiot,” distinguishable to the girls’ ears. Penelope didn’t understand fully then, but would come to realize in adulthood the partial context of the argument. “Medusa,” or ,”the Gorgon,” were names that Mrs. Elliot—Simone Le Mare who had married Edward Elliot after Nora Device had scrapped their engagement and eloped with Achilles Park instead—called Penelope’s mother. It wasn’t something that was a secret nor had it been something that had ever seemed to bother her mother when the words were said to her face even in front of others, but apparently Nora Park still struggled with parts of her early history even after a good fifteen years had passed by. The reason behind the rest of her parents’ argument, Penelope would come to infer in later years from the complicated past she knew both her mother and father shared with the Elliots when they were teenagers.

Back on the landing, the girls watched as Nora Park threw a crystal decanter against the mantelpiece only a few paces from their father who dodged the translucent shrapnel and bellowed back in outrage. Maia and Penelope startled at the explosion of glass and huddled unconsciously closer to one another on the landing.

“Why are they fighting?” Penelope whispered urgently, not hiding the fear gathering in her chest as successfully as she would have hoped when her voice cracked on the last word.

Maia’s arm wound around Penelope’s shoulders in a comforting half hug as she shrugged, but her answer didn’t make any sense to the younger girl, “Because they love one another so much that it hurts sometimes.”

Penelope watched as an antique century’s old Tiffany lamp that their housekeeper, Mae, had once scolded her for playing around hit the bricks of the fireplace, the domed wings of the Monarch butterfly that had been shading the light bulb bursting into shards of deep orange in a slow motion wave like a large ripple in a muddy pool. Penelope’s jaw dropped and she whimpered as her father skirted around the mess and pointed at it, green-gold eyes blazing as he yelled at their mother so loud that the hair on the back of Penelope’s neck stood up.

At least she wouldn’t get into trouble for almost breaking that lamp from now on when she and Paris decided to play tag inside the house, Penelope concluded in her head. The younger girl clung tighter to Maia and snuggled up to her chest for comfort.

“That’s what love looks like?” Penelope asked, horrified.

Maia rolled her eyes, but ran her hand up and down her little sister’s pajama clad back in sympathy, “Only when you and your lover are both as hotheaded and stubborn as one another.”

“So Gramps was right?” Penelope asked with a sad sniff, “Mama and Papa are a match made in Hell.”

Maia shook her head vehemently, “Grandpa Device just meant that they’re just as stubborn as one another and that he’d hoped Mother would regret her decision to elope with Papa one day because of it. Parents don't like when their children fall in love with the wrong people. It makes them feel helpless and that usually changes into anger at some point. That’s all.”

Penelope looked back down through the bars of the bannister into the doorway of the sitting room where her father stood looking pensive and their mother’s expression was a study in anguish. Penelope gasped in surprise as she noticed the tears that were running down the sides of her mother’s usually proud and beautiful tan face and it filled Penelope with cold dread because she’d never seen her mother cry before.

In fact, Penelope’s mother was the strongest person she knew overall and she also knew that her father felt the same; even loved her mother all the more for it. Penelope had once heard her father’s brothers—Uncle Lamedon and Uncle Narcissus—say that Nora Park was, “built like a fortress,” and that Achilles had been the luckiest among them to be the only one chosen to, “breach her gates,” but their snickering had stopped when Penelope’s father had entered the room and moments later two blue coon hounds raced out of their house and into the yard baying. Her two uncles spent the better part of a week sniffing other dog's butts and eating poop as punishment before her father turned them back into their natural forms. They never said anything bad about Penelope's mother again after that. 

“If that’s what love is then I don’t want it,” Penelope whispered, determined.

“It’s different for everyone,” Maia refuted softly. “It’s not the same thing to everyone all the time. See, I was right, they do still love one another! Leo owes me fifty dollars.”

Maia stuck her arm through the bars of the walnut bannister, pointing dramatically down at their parents who had gone quiet save for their mother’s near silent crying.

As indicated by Maia, their father was the first to concede defeat in the standoff between parents. His expression softened as he rubbed at the back of his dark brown haired head in a movement that Penelope would one day come to recognize as a rare show of nervousness. Then Achilles said something that neither of the girls could hear from the landing and stepped forward, enveloping Nora in his arms, his forehead resting comfortingly against hers as he continued to speak softly while his wife only nodded every so often.

Penelope felt a strange feeling squirm to life in her chest as she watched her father cup both of her mother’s cheeks in his hands and place a tender kiss on her forehead that belittled the viciousness of the battle of wills Penelope had walked in on. When their mother returned their father’s embrace and let herself be held, Achilles lifted his wife into his arms and carried her back towards the doorway leading up to the main stairway where the girls were hiding.

“Crap!” Maia hissed, scurrying backwards suddenly.

Both girls tried to make a quick and quiet exit which ended in a loud squeak of indignant pain from Penelope and the two of them falling back to the landing in a tangle of ungangly limbs. Penelope glanced up from her position beneath one of Maia’s knees and saw her father standing at the foot of the stairs, studying them both with eyebrows raised. Then he let out a tired sigh and just shook his head at them, their mother not noticing them as her eyes were now closed to the outside world as she snuggled into his broad chest sleepily. Saying nothing, their father walked down the opposite corridor that would lead to the other wing of the manor house and a second staircase that would take her parents to their third floor bedroom without the hassle of having to step over their children.

Maia groaned in embarrassment. Penelope tried to get up, but the weight of a sister seven years her senior still pinned her down as Maia struggled to get back up on her hands and knees.

“This is why we need to spy smarter, not harder,” Penelope stage whispered as she crawled to her feet and Maia sprang up the stairs ahead of them.

Years later, Penelope would miss Maia's easy belief in the power of love because by the time Penelope would discover just how wondrous and painful unconditional love could be, Maia wouldn't be there to advise her anymore. 


	5. Divide et Impera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penelope's mother schools her basically. Penelope is 7 in this chapter, Paris is 9, and her twin older siblings, Leo and Maia are 14.
> 
> I know we are spending a lot of time with Pen at the age of 7/8, but a lot happens to her in this span of her life that affects her later.

_December 2020_

Divide et Impera.

Divide and Rule.

The quote was attributed incorrectly to Julius Caesar, but it was Philip II of Macedon—the father of Alexander the Great— who had said it first and it was one of the most simple strategies to defeat and control a group of people or a place.

Penelope winces from her seat on the walnut bench in the wide corridor just outside of her mother’s home office. From behind the door beside her, she could hear the sound of Paris weeping and hearing her brother and best friend in pain made anger rise in her chest. If time travel were a real thing then Penelope was convinced that Nora Park and Philip II of Macedon would have been great friends because, “divide and rule,” was one of her mother’s favorite strategies. She cringed and her stomach dropped out of fear as she recognized her mother’s imperiously raised voice rise in volume above her brother’s crying.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but things that usually didn’t even register on Penelope’s parents’ radar had started becoming important to them all of the sudden. Paris had missed breakfast and—like any kid—he had intoned repeatedly to anyone who would listen that he was apparently, “starving,” but the Parks were pugnacious about their meal times. If you missed a meal for any reason then you went without until the next one. All of the children knew this and the house staff also knew this which was why no one listened to Paris’s plaintive cries for something to eat. It had been all but a given that Paris would end up at some point in the pantry and potentially be caught gnawing on a loaf of bread baked the day before or stuffing his mouth with cookies.

The fallout from Paris’s lapse in judgment had warranted attention from their mother, but it hadn’t just been him who she had called into her office. She had called every one of her children into the office separately and lectured them on the importance of punctuality, tradition, and necessity. So far both Maia and Leo had endured being talked at without complaint and had both been released to do whatever they wanted.

Paris had been made to wait on the bench outside the office, while Leo and Maia were both separately called up and his anxiety at whatever punishment was coming for him had eaten him up from the inside until the boy was shaking and nearly hyperventilating. That was how Penelope had found him, hunched over his knees, head buried in his arms, when she’d finally come down for her talking to. They had both waited together on the bench for what felt like forever before their mother had come out and surprised the crap out of both siblings when she had called Paris in first.

Penelope had anticipated—incorrectly—that their mother would make Paris wait until Penelope had sat through an hour of being talked at before their mother would finally put her brother out of his misery, but she hadn’t. As someone who masterminded a good deal of mischief herself, Penelope was familiar with her mother’s tactics, but not even she could truly understand the way the mechanizations of Nora Park’s steel-toothed mind worked. Penelope knew her mother, but she also knew that her mother adapted her strategies and decisions based on whatever a specific situation required.

One of the first lessons their mother had insisted that Penelope learn was that in order to survive in a world like theirs, one must be able to, “adapt and overcome,” anything and everything that stands in their way, but why change the order of which child you discipline if the ultimate goal was still to punish that guilty child by letting them stew in their own apprehension of that punishment? Why not wait until the end to scold Paris? As upset as Paris had been sitting in the corridor when Penelope found him, she knew that if he’d been forced to wait there another hour, he would’ve been a wreck, which had to be what their mother had intended, right?

Unless…the ultimate goal of the exercise wasn’t to punish Paris, not really.

Penelope knew that the reason Paris was in real trouble wasn’t because he had slept through breakfast or that he’d raided the pantry, it was something absurd like _how_ he had raided the pantry. Their mother’s lessons were always convoluted like that. All of them had been carefully calculated to teach her children how to survive and even circumvent normal rules and even the laws that governed society. It was a trademark of Nora Park that nothing she ever said, did, or thought was simple.

That was it!

Paris wasn’t being punished because he had let his hunger get the better of him or even because he had snuck into the pantry before lunch…he was being punished because he’d been _caught_, Penelope realized, the sudden lightbulb flickering on in her mind. Paris had been reckless; careless even. He’d been so overtaken with his need to eat something that he hadn’t taken the necessary precautions to cover his tracks. And knowing how earnest Paris was, he probably hadn’t even attempted to _lie_ about it—which Penelope knew—would be the ultimate sin to their mother. He’d given up, given in.

A Park never gave up, never surrendered and a Device—Nora’s family name before she had married Penelope’s father—always found a way to talk someone out of or into something. Their first ancestor with the Device name—some silver peddler from the time of the Black Death—had reportedly sold his soul to a demon for the power to protect his family from the plague that was sweeping Europe at the time and when it was over he had somehow managed to trick the demon into giving back his soul and being allowed to keep the magic he was given. How was never exactly explained in family lore, but that was because the way the peddler had swindled the demon wasn’t important, it was that he _had_ found a way to trick the demon without losing anything in the process.

That was the point. And that was also what Penelope was sure Paris was being lectured upon as she sat there and listened to her mother’s muffled voice through the carved oak door. That was nothing Penelope had ever been punished for, but she was a fast learner and she could lie her way out of or into almost anything. Paris never had been able to and neither could Maia surprisingly enough. Their hearts were too big; too warm and caring for constant effective deception. Or for growing up in this house.

Penelope had learned the hard lesson when she was still very small that she would and could do anything if it allowed her to protect herself or the people she loved. Her heart was wrapped under barbed wire, two layers of protective stone walls, with landmines laid at predictable intervals just to be thorough. Penelope did what her mother did, she cut off her emotions from the world and isolated, internalized, and mirrored indifference in whatever ways would allow her to best survive and thrive…which was messed up.

No kid should have to grow up guarded like that and yet Penelope was proof that such a thing was possible.

Penelope swallowed as she wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back against the wall behind the bench. She’d often wondered—usually absently without much dwelling—what it would be like to have a normal mother and father instead of the parents Penelope had always known. What would it be like to come home to hugs and kisses and homework help and afternoon snacks or family movie night? Penelope would never know those simple joys, though she’d always wanted them.

But Penelope and her siblings—her mother was fond of reminding them—weren’t normal children so it made sense that they didn’t have normal parents. Instead, they were Parks, descended from two very powerful magical bloodlines filled to brimming with prehistory, legacies, and even enemies that each of them would one day inherit whether they liked it or not. It was an uncomfortable truth that Penelope had been reminded about daily ever since she was old enough to understand such thing.

Nora Park took pride in the fact that she wasn’t a normal mom. She didn’t bother to hide the fact that she wouldn’t coddle her children—not even from other parents—and because of that, she believed that her children would be able to go out into the world and stand on their own two feet and thrive independently as so many young adults seemed not to be able to do for various reasons. Maybe—Nora even allowed herself to imagine—one or two of her children would go on to rule the supernatural world. Penelope wouldn’t rule that out as one of her mother’s varied dreams for their futures.

And though it made Penelope’s dormant temper flare whenever she would be reminded that her life really wasn’t her own, she had to admit that Nora Park was nothing if not rational. Her approach to childrearing was harsh, indeed, but it made sense in a way, for her children to be prepared for the unusual trials and tribulations that awaited them based on their magical heritage. After all, had Penelope’s paternal grandfather not been so sentimental that he hadn’t even been able to notice that his best friend—who came from a family the Parks had already been engaged in a bloody feud with for four centuries—was about to stab him literally in the back until it was too late?

Actaeus Park had been a good man. On the rare occasions when Achilles talked about his father, he did so with an expression that was half somber grimace and half fond remembrance. Actaeus had been a good man who treated everyone equally and had loved his wife and children openly. His goodness; his earnestness—both traits that Paris and Maia had inherited from him—weren’t conducive to surviving in a world that was always hostile towards you, a world that your ancestors had been determined to burn to the ground so they could raise something of their own making from the ashes. Achilles Park and his brothers had gone into a brief exile in the mortal world after their parents’ murders before being taken in by Grandfather Device—who was the advisor to the Coven Leader and the second most powerful man in New England at the time.

Had her Grandfather Device not taken Achilles and his four siblings in for his own selfish reasons, Penelope never would have been born. Her father never would have grown up seething with ambition and the need to avenge his lost family and lead it back to its former glory. And Nora Device—the woman who was currently wiping the floor with Paris’s emotions in the office behind Penelope—wouldn’t have fallen in love with the powerful Park heir whose ambition and independence rivaled her own. The Parks were a messed up family of misfits—of that--no one could convince Penelope otherwise, but the hard truth was that had her father not learned how to survive and thrive, their bloodline would’ve ended with him.

_We’re Parks, Penelope,_ her father had told her one day in September when she’d been horrified to find him in the crypt like basement under their home, torturing the son of the man who had murdered her Grandfather Acteaus. _We make the hard choices. We do the things other people can’t live with or even imagine doing, not because we enjoy it, but because its what is necessary for us to survive. We’re the monsters of the story so no one else has to be; because we can bare it. We’re strong enough to do what has to be done and one day you will be too. _

That day was still burned into Penelope's memory. She'd started the day being carried through the Wine Cellar by her Papa with Maia and Paris complaining behind her and had ended it, following a sound deep into the foundations of their ancient house, watching her Achilles--her beloved Papa--beating the crap out of Galen Morrell. Penelope still saw it sometimes when she closed her eyes--the flames dancing in Achilles's green gaze and the vitriol with which he violently struck the tied up man--and she still didn't know how to combine that version of her father with the one who'd carried her through the Wine Cellar gently because she'd scrapped one of her knees or the man who'd held his wife's face tenderly between his hands as they pressed their foreheads together and whispered apologies. 

Penelope shook her head, trying to shake the memories away. She would deal with the ambivalence that moment had sparked, but right now, she had her mother to focus on.

Though Penelope would always maintain far into the future that her parents could have shown more love to their own children and not compromised their chances of doing well in the world, she couldn’t argue with their family history and the danger it brought to them and all they loved.

Her parents were trying to keep them all alive and safe and, by that metric, who cared if they were happy so long as they were breathing?

The office door to Penelope’s left was suddenly pulled open with the force of a vaccum that seemed to pull all of Penelope’s inner musings from her head and suck them inside of the office where her mother—one arm slung over Paris’s shoulders—ushered Penelope’s brother out into the hall. He sniffed pitifully and his eyes were swollen from crying, but he held his chin surprisingly high, though he wouldn’t met Penelope’s eyes. Before releasing him, Nora turned Paris to face her and knelt down, wearing—as always—one of those slim black dresses that hugged her like a glove. Her ‘’Pandora dresses,” though why their mother called them that, Penelope had yet to figure out. Paris looked up to meet his mother’s dark ; piercing gaze.

“Do you understand?’ was all their mother asked.

Paris nodded his head fervently and—to Penelope’s shock and surprise—she watched as her mother then leaned forward and planted a quick kiss on Paris’s forehead before ushering him down the hall towards his room where the boy would be waiting until they were all called for lunch. Nora stood, turning her dark chocolate eyes on Penelope now.

“Come in,” she said.

Penelope knew that she wasn't really being given a choice in the matter so she hopped off of the bench and did what she was told. The first thing Penelope saw when she walked into her mother’s office was a painting on the far wall directly opposite the doorway. In it a beautiful ebony haired woman held two struggling children against her half naked body. In the woman’s one free hand, she gripped a dagger pointed downward menacingly at the nearest child. Nora—who’d stepped back into the office behind Penelope—noticed and followed Penelope’s gaze.

“That painting is called, ‘Medea,’ by Eugene Delacroix and it’s a reproduction of the original currently in the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille,” Nora supplied, closing the door and moving to stand behind her desk. “It’s a retelling of guess what Greek myth?”

Penelope didn’t answer as anger warred with shame in Penelope’s heart. This—a painting of Medea preparing to murder her children in order to get revenge on her husband—she realized, was likely the first thing Paris had been forced to see too when he had walked into the room. The placement of the painting wasn’t a coincidence. It was on purpose. Everything Nora Park did was on purpose.

“Why do you have this here? Is there a reason for it or does it just tickle your twisted sense of humor?” Penelope asked, almost in a sneer as she glared at her unflappable mother like she was the worst of bullies.

Penelope’s voice was low, burdened with unusual emotion and the strength of her youthful defiance to authority. She had been hoping to get some sort of outward reaction from their mother, but Nora so seldom gave away what she was feeling behind the unreadable mask she always wore. Her mother didn’t miss a beat though when she replied, expression neutral as it always was and voice calm.

“It was a wedding present actually,” Nora explained, her hawk-like gaze leaving Penelope to scrutinize the painting as though, by doing so, she could force it to give up its secrets. “From your Grandfather Device.”

What?!

Penelope’s eyes grew comically wide with actual horror as she looked back and forth between Nora and the painting.

A present? A fricking Wedding present?!

Who is the frilly hell gave a painting of a woman killing her children to a young couple on their wedding day who would presumably then go on to have children of their own?

Grandfather Device—like his only daughter—wasn’t a compassionate man. He had never coddled his children, which was likely where Nora had learned some of her parenting style. Whenever Penelope and her siblings were sent to visit their Grandfather, it was like having a meeting with their mother, only Grandfather was older and a man.

The only concrete facts Penelope knew about Grandfather Device was that he was the only man her father was truly terrified of, Nora was Grandfather’s only daughter and favorite child, and apparently—though Penelope herself had never been able to confirm it with her own eyes—her grandfather had both loved and been deeply devoted to his Javanese born wife until she had passed away three years or so before Penelope was born. Her Uncle Van—the most jovial of Nora’s brothers—liked to joke that grandmother had been the only person who could get Grandfather Device to crack a smile , something none of the Park children had ever seen him do.

Grandfather Device wasn’t a good man by any metric, but why would he give something like this to his favorite child on her wedding day? Why not just not show up or something like that if he was so mad?

“Why…” Penelope began in a soft whisper, stopping to clear her throat before she continued in a voice more like her own. “Why would he give you this?”

Nora’s expression didn’t change as she switched her attention from the painting back to her daughter.

“Your grandfather was upset with me for breaking the engagement he had painstakingly arranged for me to elope with your father, so when the ‘for show,’ wedding happened this was how he showed his distaste for your father’s and my arrogance.”

“Who has their marriages arranged for them anymore?”

“My parents did,” Nora explained. “Your Grandfather Device was the firstborn son in his family and its always the firstborn in the Device bloodline who continues the direct descent of the family. Your Great-grandfather was very ambitious so he made an obscure match with the granddaughter of a business associate in Jakarta whose supernatural heritage was….unique…even among their own . My mother and father met on their wedding day and my father adored my mother forever after. In the culture of her people, magical descent and descent in general was passed through women, not men and your Grandfather Device—as stubborn and stuck in his old ways as he is—made an exception for my mother. He made sure that she was his equal in all things and that even his extended family understood that or else. Anyway, the point is, they were happy together and my father had expected that I would marry Coven Leader Elliot’s son and be just as happy, but that wasn’t what I wanted.

“This,” Nora paused for dramatic effect, pointing at the offensive painting before continuing. “Is just the fallout from all of that. It implies that a marriage to Achilles would spiral to mirror the destructive love of Jason and Medea, a love which drove her to kill her own children in revenge. I’ve never taken the painting’s meaning to heart though as my father intended. Now, please, Penelope, sit down.”

Nora motioned to the plush chair on the other side of her desk as she too took her seat in a leather office chair. Penelope gave the travesty of French romanticism on the wall one further fleeting glare before plopping down in the indicated chair across from her mother. In the time that it had taken Penelope to walk over to the desk by the wall and sit down, Nora had begun keenly scanning an investment ledger that Penelope knew had nothing to do with their meeting.

It was a subtle, but powerful message—one of her mother’s favorite tricks. _I’m the one in control here, _it screamed_, and I decide how we proceed and when._

Nora continued reviewing and initialing several reports stapled to the ledger before setting them aside and returning her full attention to Penelope.

“Why—do you imagine—did I ask you to come in here?” Nora asked, folding her hand together on the surface of the rich oak desk in front of her.

Penelope shrugged half-heartedly. For whatever reason, she didn’t have the energy right now to take an interest in how her mother thought or what obscure lesson she was trying to teach. Instead, Penelope felt resentment simmering low in her chest and she knew that if she refused to answer her mother like a normal person, it might come with consequences, but it might also make her mother mad and Penelope wanted to inspire the type of feelings in her mother that she was being forced to feel right now.

With anyone other than Nora Park, it would have worked, but Penelope’s mother could mask and internalize emotions better than an evil mastermind on TV. Unwaveringly, her mother held Penelope’s green gaze without blinking and waited until finally the woman had outlasted the patience of even the most intrepid seven year old, even Penelope.

The small girl sighed tiredly and crossed her arms over her chest, finally giving in. “I’m here because Paris ate a bag of unsanctioned cookies.”

Was that the shadow of a smirk? Penelope wondered, or did she imagine the one corner of her mother’s mouth struggling not to tick upward, the woman’s legendary restraint not enough to hide the slight twitch from Penelope’s studious gaze.

“And?” Nora asked, voice still calm and flat.

Penelope rolled her eyes, kicking her feet through the free air a few times as she struggled to remain seated, “And you called me here already knowing that I would never be that reckless—not even if I were starving—so I’m tempted to think that you’ve finally lost all of your marbles.”

Penelope met her mother’s eyes again, attempting to feign bravery that she didn’t feel or to at least put on a show of bored indifference to show her mother how sick to death she was of all of her manipulative games.

“That’s it?” Her mother asked, actually smiling for a change, amusement clear in her voice. “That’s what you got from all this? How disappointing. And to think, I was just telling the Coven Leader the other day how you may well turn out to be the cleverest of my children and more than a match for me. Ah, well. As hard as it is to admit it, I think I was wrong.”

Penelope fumed inside, her ears turning red as she tried to push the feeling down and away. This was what Nora wanted. Penelope knew how smart she was. She’d always dominated her other siblings at the puzzles their mother would devise for them in the nursery to better gauge their natural talents both common and magical. Maia was the only one who ever finished the puzzles faster than Penelope—because their brothers got frustrated and gave up usually halfway through—but she was twice Penelope’s age!

The fact that Penelope could mentally compete with someone twice her own age and could read people of all ages with a 98% accuracy rating, made her feel superior to the other children of the other four families in their coven. She was also powerful—so powerful in fact—that Achilles had convinced himself not long after her naming ceremony where the elders had prophesized what was in store for her, that Penelope was his long awaited heir both in mental and magical strength.

Penelope knew she was his favorite for that reason and she also knew that that was why Nora expected so much more from her younger daughter than she seemed to from her other children, even Maia, who was _everyone’s_ favorite person. 

Just then, Nora cocked her head to the side, eyes seemingly regarding Penelope in a dimmer light for a moment before she spoke, “Maybe you truly aren’t smart enough to piece together what is really going on.”

The moment she let out a half exasperated sigh and frustrated scream, Penelope knew she’d lost the battle with her pride. Nora Park could push anyone’s buttons, her own family’s especially.

“I’m not stupid! I get it!” Penelope hissed adamantly as she shot up out of her chair, standing only a head taller than the desk itself. “I’m just sick of all of your stupid head games! Why can’t you be like a normal mom?”

Nora’s expression didn’t change at the confession, but something in her posture, shifted slightly, stiffened, “Alright, now you’re just wasting both of our time. You know the answer to that question already. I’m not answering it again and if you persist in being stubborn then you will remain in this room as punishment for the rest of the day until bedtime.”

Penelope clenched her jaw, her tiny hands balling into fists at her sides. It was an ultimatum that she knew she couldn’t ignore. A picky child in a family of three might say they don’t want whatever their parents painstakingly prepared for dinner and be given the threat that they might be sent to bed without any food at all, but in the modern world of helicopter parenting, such threats were as empty usually as they were unimaginable to be carried out. But Nora Park didn’t play. If she threatened you, you could be sure that it was something that would be followed through with.

Having already smelled the tempting aroma of the Chicken Fricassee that was being prepared by the chef in the kitchen for their midday meal, Penelope’s stomach growled in protest at the potential of being left without food.

“All you have to do,” Nora repeated, “Is tell me why you were called here? I won’t ask again.”

Penelope let out a loud exhale, staring up at the plaster ceiling, “Because Paris got caught. He wasn’t cautious. If he’d taken the bag of cookies back to his room, eaten it, then lied about eating it successfully, then you and Papa wouldn’t have punished any of us. Because the point you are trying to make is that stealing isn’t the crime if its taking what you need to survive, it’s not being able to hide it or use it to your advantage going forward. ‘Recklessness hastens the grave.’”

There was what felt like a super long silence as Penelope continued to stare at the plaster, begging it to move or sing or dance or something that would get her out of this stupid room. When she finally risked a look back down, Nora was watching her expression unreadable, but there was a shine in her dark eyes.

A shine of naked pride.

“Alright,” Nora said, standing and opening the door. “You’re free to go until lunch is ready.”

Penelope took in a deep breath and then let it go, hearing her heart pound against her ribcage as a maelstrom of emotions raged through her, emotions that she would one day learn how to hide, even from her mother. 


	6. Investments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Posie love session. Penelope is 15 and Josie is 14 going on 15?

_April 2028_

“Did your mom really send you here to keep an eye on my dad’s school?”

Josie asked the question cuddled up to Penelope’s side as they lay on her bed and watched a girl who’d left the cabin in the woods she was staying at with her friends –as sure a way to die as any in a horror movie—start running across the screen of the smart TV on the end table in Penelope’s room.

It was a Friday night and they’d both decided they didn’t want to deal with the weekly party that was being thrown at the Old Mill.

More often than not these days, they kept that time for themselves as it was one of the few times Josie wasn’t trailing Lizzie around like a shadow or when Lizzie would shanghai one of their dates and turn it into a hang out session for the three of them without any complaint from Josie. Whenever Lizzie did something unashamedly selfish that made Penelope resent her more, Josie's soft brown eyes would look up at her, silently begging Penelope for her understanding and Penelope—as she always did when it came to Josie—pushed down her natural instinct to fight back and conceded to the will of Josie’s intentionally rude and clingy twin.

But Lizzie was at the party tonight and there was no chance that she'd leave early just to interrupt them, not when there were hot boys to stalk.

Penelope, bending slightly to place a quick kiss on Josie’s forehead, chuckled softly, “Not on the school so much as the on money my parents gave to the school, but yeah, basically.”

Josie leaned over Penelope, using her folded arms on Penelope’s chest to support her head so she and her girlfriend were still at eye level, completely ignoring the predictable sequence of events taking place on the screen behind them. The only thought Penelope found herself able to entertain in that moment was how cute Josie looked when she was confused and how warm and soft her skin was where it touched her own.

“But…I thought you said your dad and my dad were friends when they were kids or something like that?”

“Oh, they were something like that, but whereas my father wanted to invest in Ric Saltzman’s dream because he trusts and respects your dad and his parents, my mother is the one who controls the purse strings of our family’s money and coven’s business assets.” Penelope elaborated, rolling her eyes dramatically which made Josie giggle at her. “She never makes an investment that she doesn’t already know will pay dividends. So when my father became adamant on funding your dad’s dream, not an already lucrative business, my mother decided that sending me to Salvatore was the best way to assess whether or not it paid off.”

Josie smiled, shaking her head in amusement, “Your parents are so weird.”

“Says the Gemini twin daughter of a human father and a perky blonde vampire mother,” Penelope huffed with a smirk.

Josie didn’t answer, just leaned forward and kissed Penelope. Time and space became irrelevant whenever Josie kissed her. It was like all of the problems, every single little evil lurking to trip you up at every corner, tucked its tail and ran in the face of so brilliant and tender an expression of love. Penelope couldn’t think of anything else but Josie as the girl straddled her hips and she didn’t want to care about anything outside of the world of them. For all of Josie’s flaws, specifically the fact that she passively refused—for whatever reason—to live her own life in the presence of her more assertive blonde twin, Penelope loved her more than anything. Every part of her, her heart, her body, her mind, her soul…Penelope could finally understand how her parents could argue and fight so fiercely and still find being together in a clearly trying marriage worthwhile.

Penelope had told herself back then, while watching her parents argue violently in the foyer from the second floor landing with her older sister, that she never wanted to fall in love if that was what love was like, but she had been so wrong. Not all love was the same and Josie’s love…was everything to Penelope.

Loving Josie was like breathing, mostly easy and always necessary. When the two of them were together, Penelope was happy, irreverently and illogically happy and she found herself actively ignoring every other facet of love as she dreamed that this feeling lasted forever. But in the back of her mind, the little indignant voice that was the source of Penelope’s protective anger and her deep seeded fears, was constantly whispering to her that she couldn’t love someone who didn’t truly love themselves forever. It was like an army invading Russia in the dead cold of winter—an untenable strategy that could never succeed—and yet Penelope only kissed Josie that much harder in response to the warnings, rolling the girl over onto her back on the bed and leaning her forehead against the other girl’s once they’d separated.

She knew better than anyone the havoc young love could wreak…and the tragedy and pain it could cause. For a briefly moment, an image flashed against the inside of Penelope’s closed eyelids. An image of Maia and their father arguing loudly in the kitchen, their house staff having fled from the spot for fear of getting in the middle of a war between the unstoppable force of young stupid love and an immovable object that never relented. Achilles’s angry words couldn’t be understood, but the vehemence in his tone had followed Penelope and Paris to their hiding place in the pantry where they could spy through the partially closed door. Maia’s cheeks were slick with tears beneath the eco-friendly kitchen lighting, her green eyes sad and resigned while their father finally lost control of his temper on the other side of the kitchen island, grabbing a copper fruit bowl and throwing it behind him to clash harmlessly into one stone wall. The rest of the image was hazy except for her big sister’s crying…that Penelope would never forget for as long as she lived.

The image disappeared as quickly as it had come and Penelope suddenly found herself being held in Josie’s warm arms, safe and happy and so ready to put everything else in her life on the back burner just to enjoy this moment with the girl she loved and who loved her just as devotedly back. She felt, but didn’t see Josie smile against her mouth where their ghosting lips were almost touching as they both caught their breath.

“What’s got you so distracted tonight?” Josie asked, tilting her head slightly away from Penelope on the pillow so she could meet Penelope’s now open and confused green eyes.

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only thing distracting me in this room,” Penelope quipped, leaning in for another kiss, but Josie moved teasingly just out of reach again, looking at her expectantly.

Josie ran her hands up over Penelope’s cheeks, fingers weaving together behind Penelope’s neck and playing with the little hairs at the base of her neck and as she waited patiently. Penelope sighed tiredly and bent her head down so her forehead was resting against Josie’s collarbone, before she raised it again and rested her chin there instead.

“I don’t know…I just feel….off,” Penelope said, not knowing how to explain it.

The trouble with being trained from your earliest days to suppress your emotions was that you never knew what to do with them when one slipped its leash and got out of hand. Loving Josie was everything, but opening her heart up to love Josie had opened Penelope’s heart irrevocably. The barbed wire had been cut ; the stone walls that had always protected the raven haired girl’s heart had been enthusiastically knocked down and suddenly Penelope found herself feeling more vulnerable sometimes than she had ever allowed herself to feel in her life.

Being open to love also meant being open to pain and Penelope found it harder and harder to summon the neutral indifference she’d always depended upon in her past life to keep her head above water. After she and Josie had started dating, Penelope had found that there were times where she would become upset about something that usually wouldn’t have bothered her before or something that would remind her of something that had happened to her and the memory wouldn’t be as easy to push away and reshelf. Penelope could do without the occasional moments of emotional confusion, but she wouldn’t exchange her relationship with Josie for all the richest in the world.

Penelope’s mother—unsurprisingly—had detected a change in her daughter over the phone during their monthly check-ins and had subtly pushed the topic to test just how enthralled Penelope was with, ‘that Saltzman girl,’ or if it was only a minor infatuation that was sure to pass on quickly. Penelope—just as stubborn as Nora and as hot-blooded as Achilles—had told her mother in no uncertain terms that Josie was non-negotiable. She wouldn’t give her up for anything. Her mother hadn’t explicitly asked Penelope to let Josie go yet, but the raven haired girl had a sinking sensation that when she went home over holiday break, the shit would hit the fan and Nora would see how pathetic Penelope was without Josie beside her and immediately go on the offensive in the anticipation of oncoming tragedy.

The intensity of Penelope’s feelings at any given time were her responsibility, but they weren’t always just due to the strength of her individual convictions. Genetics too were to blame.

Parks were notoriously impulsive and passionate in their feelings, whatever they may be, but Devices weren’t ever ruled by anything. To them love was a weakness. Penelope’s mother hadn’t believed that once upon a time when she’d been uncharacteristically rebellious enough to elope with Penelope’s father, but now she was more determined on that point than any member of the Device family and she was sure to drive it home to Penelope as painfully as their father had done with Maia in the kitchen all of those years ago. Penelope was stronger than Maia though, she knew it. She could thrive in adversity—that was what her parents had raised her to do after all—and she would withstand all of the pressure, flippant comments, and passive-aggressiveness that returning to her ancestral home would entail if it meant being able to come back to Josie.

Her father—Achilles—considered Alaric like he was family already, so if Penelope needed to, she was sure she could draw her father into her corner if the subject came to a head with their mother. He would likely defend her and declare the topic not up for discussion, which it was already, but Nora was like a dog with a bone, she would never give something up until she was forced to do so.

“Are you okay?” Josie asked, brow creased in concern and worry, raising her adrenaline levels as her body stiffened beneath Penelope’s, losing the joy of the moment. “Did something happen today?”

Penelope smiled and shook her head, nuzzling into the side of Josie’s neck. Tonight was her night with her girlfriend. It might be the only night all weekend Penelope might be able to spend with her girlfriend if Lizzie managed to commandeer all of Josie’s time for the next two days, which happened more often than Penelope would’ve liked. She didn’t want her problems to pull them out of their safe, cuddly little nest. Josie just worried because she loved her, Penelope knew, but Josie didn’t need to worry about her. If she survived growing up as a Park, then Penelope knew she could survive anything no matter how difficult it was. With Josie by her side, she could do anything and right now all she wanted to do was remind Josie just how much she was worth.

“I’m happy just being here with you right now, in this moment,” Penelope mumbled in between the kisses she placed on Josie’s jaw and neck. “I love you and I fully intend to show you just how much tonight. That’s all that matters.”

Josie sighed, conceding defeat for now, even though Penelope knew that Josie wouldn’t let go of her worry until she was sure that her girlfriend was truly okay. For now though—Josie’s legs wrapping around Penelope’s hips as they started to kiss again—they were two hearts and two beings that were about to become one. Nothing else in the world mattered but these two girls and the love between them.

If only things had been able to stay that way.


	7. An Odd Discovery Beyond the Trees

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maia causes turmoil that Penelope can never forget. Also, just to make reading easier, I pronounce Kjartan: Kee-AR-tan.
> 
> Ages: 
> 
> Penelope = 7  
Maia = 14  
Kjartan= 16  
Paris = 10  
Rune = 10  
Sarah = 7

_June 2021_

Penelope scowled, kicking a stray pebble into the lake ahead of her as she huddled on the sandy shore, arms wrapped around her knees.

Rune Elliot and Paris Park both swam in the shallows, slapping misshapen nimbuses of clear water at one another that sparkled like shards of glass beneath the high afternoon sun and cloudless sky. Beside Penelope, Sarah Elliot sat down Indian-style. She was small—the same age as Penelope oddly just as her brother was the same age as Paris—and the opposite of the raven haired girl her posture was mirroring in every way possible. Where Penelope was calculating and careful, Sarah was trusting and tended to act without thinking about the consequences. Where Penelope’s features were dark and sun-kissed, Sarah was blonde and palely complected with a light dusting of freckles tattooed like ever changing constellations across her face and arms. Where Penelope’s natural instinct was to frown until she had reason to smile, Sarah smiled as often as possible, pale blue eyes radiating joy in a way Penelope envied even when there was no joy to be had.

Penelope didn’t mind the rambunctious blonde’s company, but it wasn’t something she welcomed at all times. She valued solitude as much as possible, but not today. Today Penelope felt oddly bereft. Lonely even. Both of her parents were away on business as they often were and Maia was supposed to be watching Paris and Penelope, but she’d literally skipped out of the house just after breakfast that morning and had yet to return. Their brother Leo was out somewhere with his rich boarding school friends, but Penelope rarely paid attention to her eldest brother’s coming and goings. The less she saw of him, the fewer chances Leo had to bully her.

Her eldest brother gave the stereotype of the, ‘evil twin,’ a real life spin. He and Maia were fraternal twins and Leo cared very little for anyone other than himself and her. Penelope had long studied the tapestries hanging in the libraries and common rooms of their manor house which listed the Park family’s lineage all the way back to 1066 and she had never seen any twins among it’s branches. They were common in other magical families, a classic example was the Gemini Coven. Penelope had read in a history book once that said the Gemini Coven had produced so many multiple births in one generation in the early days of their forming, that the coven itself had been renamed after them. Penelope’s maternal grandmother too had come from a magical bloodline in Sumatra that was known for its unusually powered twins, but they were rare in that bloodline too. Even for them though, Leo and Maia were an anomaly.

The Park twins were as different from one another as two sides of a coin, but they were close in a way. Emotionally, they were tethered to one another. One couldn’t feel pain, stress, or exhaustion without the other feeling it too and if that wasn’t weird enough, the way their personalities were divided perfectly took the cake. Leo was self-serving, didn’t seem to know what to do with emotions except for anger, and had the ability to use only one form of magic whereas Maia was warm and had inherited the humanity Leo lacked as well as a natural affinity for light magic.

Leo was terrifying though in his darkness. Penelope remembered with a shudder one afternoon a few months ago where Leo had picked her up by the collar of her shirt and hissed in her face that the one thing he regretted in life was that he hadn’t smothered her in her crib when their parents brought her home from the hospital. Penelope had been too scared and surprised to say anything to that aside from cry, but Maia had been quick to intervene and Leo had left her alone for the rest of that day. Penelope’s sister didn’t make excuses for her twin ever nor was it her responsibility to do so, but Penelope knew without being told that Maia was the only reason Leo hadn’t smothered her in her crib. Maia tempered Leo’s rage and numbness with her overwhelming warmth enough on a regular basis for Penelope to come to that conclusion on her own, but afterwards Maia had only hugged the stunned girl and drawn Penelope into a game of tag. So Penelope had put the strange incident with Leo out of her mind.

For as much as Penelope disliked Leo, she loved Maia. Maia was loving and generous and funny and smart and—in many ways that Penelope would never admit out loud—Maia was Penelope’s personal hero. It was the little things like how she always knew what Paris and Penelope needed when she babysat them without even being told. How she told funny stories at her own expense to make Penelope or Paris laugh whenever they were said. Or how Maia had lived so long growing up in their house, with their parents, and maintained the same level of constant kindness and faith in humanity awed Penelope, but not today.

Today Maia had uncharacteristically shirked her duties and abandoned Paris and Penelope to a point that they’d felt bored enough to wander over to the Elliot estate and ask Sarah and Rune out to play with them. As much fun as the boys were having, Penelope couldn’t stop ruminating on Maia’s unusual and sudden absence. 

Penelope startled when two fingers attempted to pull both sides of her grimace up into a failed smile. The raven haired girl batted the offending hands away and looked sternly at the blonde sitting beside her, but Sarah Elliot only shrugged, looking as innocent as ever under the looming threat of possible retaliation.

“You looked sad,” was all the girl said in answer.

_I am sad_, Penelope thought, but she didn’t give voice to her feelings.

Lesson #1 On Nora Park’s list of Survival Tips was to never show anyone what you are thinking or feeling because once you do, that person has the power in that situation. A brief flash of memory of the night Penelope had watched her parents argue from the safety of the second floor landing with Maia played against th back of her eyelids. She remembered her mother’s dark eyes flashing dangerously, hurt tears pouring down her cheeks as she yelled at Penelope’s father. The words hadn’t been recorded, but the image couldn’t be forgotten. Her mother was a hypocrite, but then everyone was a little bit.

Penelope shook her head, trying to bring herself back into the moment. The feel of Sarah’s head resting on the raven haired girl’s shoulder caused her to flinch, but she surprised herself when she didn’t pull away from the contact.

“Sooooooooooooooo…,” Sarah drew out the single word until Penelope cleared her throat. “Do you want to go exploring because I’m bored here?”

Penelope bit her lip. She and Paris were supposed to stay within the property lines surrounding their ancestral home. Breaking rules never ended well, but Penelope and Paris had already crossed into their neighbor’s vast backyard so the dreaded lecture from their mother was forthcoming anyway. Might as well enjoy herself if she was already going to be punished.

No sooner had Penelope nodded in agreement than Sarah sprang up to her feet and started running backwards up the hill behind them, shouting, “Great! Race you to the dead oak stump!” before darting into the tree line of the neighboring woods. Penelope scrambled up and ran after her, luckily hopping over upraised tree roots and through shrubs that were sure to make her bare legs itch later. She wasn’t someone who enjoyed physical activity like Sarah, but the only thing Penelope liked less than physical exertion was losing and she wasn’t about to lose in anything to Sarah Elliot of all people.

Penelope had to admit that navigating through roots and underbrush and vines wasn’t her strong suit. She liked to explore around her family’s home and investigate all the old crap that had been left to rust and gather dust inside of the outlying buildings on their property that weren’t in use anymore, but that was at her own leisurely pace. Running through the forest, able to only glimpse the blonde of Sarah’s ponytail just before it disappeared through a screen of leaves and cloying branches though, wasn’t at Penelope’s preferred pace. So the raven haired girl was annoyed but not surprised when she reached what was left of the two hundred year old oak tree that had fallen over in the last thunderstorm to find Sarah already sitting on one side of the large stump, kicking her legs back and forth through the air and grinning from ear to ear.

“Beat you!” the girl declared enthusiastically, raising her hands in the air. “I am the champion!”

Penelope couldn’t get enough air into her lungs to respond to that as she leaned over, hands on her knees as she loudly inhaled and exhaled, but before she could reply nonverbally with the vulgar hand gesture her Uncle Von was so fond of directing at Penelope’s mother, they both heard a sound.

A light, airy sound. A laugh or something like it that carried itself to Penelope’s ears despite the blood pounding in her veins after the race.

“Did you hear that?”

Sarah’s eyebrows climbed her forehead and wove together in confusion as she nodded. She stood on the stump on her tip toes, looking for signs of people around them, but there was no one except for the two of them in a sea of summer green foliage. They both waited a few minutes before Sarah shrugged and plopped back down while Penelope stomped over to the stump and sat on the other side. 

“I wish this tree hadn’t fallen down,” Sarah lamented.

Penelope nodded, though she knew Sarah couldn’t see it from behind her.

Their dads and Penelope’s uncles had set up a tire swing using an old tractor tire and a length of nautical rope from one of the sturdier branches of the huge oak when they were children. By the time Penelope had grown up enough to get permission to go on playdates away from home, it was a sacred rite of passage to be able to stand up in the tire and hang on for dear life as the large rope was wrapped around the tree, then let go to swing free faster and faster as it circled back around gaining speed. Both Maia and Leo had done it a long time ago apparently and bragged about it whenever they accompanied the younger kids back here.

When they’d been in these woods the last time in April, Rune and Paris had tried to do it themselves, but Paris had fallen off of the tire and sprained his knee. After that there had been some half-baked plans made between the children of building their own treehouse at the top of the massive tree, but before any one of them had brought it up to their parents, the tree had been knocked over and the point was moot.

“You know where would be a good spot for a new tire swing?” Sarah ventured, turning to Penelope.

Penelope rolled her eyes, but gave the girl her attention nonetheless. “Where?”

“That tree by the lake,” Sarah said. “But the water is probably too shallow there to dive into without killing ourselves.”

“Yeah, not dying is good,” Penelope agreed, amused at the unusually dark musings of the other girl.

When Sarah started a conversation, it was usually about ponies, puppies, kittens or unicorns—though not necessarily in that order—but lately she hadn’t been talking about those things as much for which Penelope was grateful. Those things had never been in her wheelhouse of interests.

“Or we could just build a treehouse and spell It so our brothers can’t come in,” Penelope offered, nudging Sarah out of whatever thoughts she’d been indulging.

At the suggestion, Sarah’s blue eyes lit up and she opened her mouth to loudly exclaim something, but they were both interrupted by that sound again. Closer and clearer. It was definitely a laugh or a constant string of giggles.

“What the ?” Sarah cried indignantly instead.

She jumped back onto the ground. Penelope perked up, but was hesitant to get back up again after the run.

“Come on, Penny Dreadful,” Sarah waved Penelope enthusiastically forward just before she again disappeared through a bunch of green leaves.

Penelope groaned dramatically in misery and got up, trudging after Sarah. The girl wasn’t running now thankfully, but stepping carefully through bushes and pulling apart branches that had grown together as Penelope followed in her wake, both of them listening for the sound again. There was another sound, but it wasn’t a laugh, but an excited shriek that was so loud that Penelope almost jumped three feet in the air before grabbing Sarah’s shoulders and ushering the blonde ahead of her towards whatever potential threat was out there. Penelope wasn’t a fast runner after all. She needed all the head start she could get, even if the thought of sacrificing a lifelong friend made Penelope’s chest swell with guilt.

Sarah turned halfway around, glaring. The reversal of their usual dispositions was enough to make Penelope forget any danger and cover her mouth with her hand to stifle her own giggles.

Laughter. Again.

Sarah pulled Penelope behind her in that general direction and almost fell over headlong into a blackberry bramble as Penelope slammed into her back. They both dropped down before the two figures in the clearing ahead of them could see them. Penelope bit her lip as thornes from the blackberry bush dug into her shin, but her eyes widened and she gasped in surprise when she looked up and through the leaves.

Maia.

It was Maia laying on her stomach on a blanket spread out over the earth watching a boy that looked vaguely familiar to Penelope do an impression of something. He struck a silly pose and mostly held it before losing his balance and crashing back down to the blanket. Maia laughed, tan cheeks slightly ruddy and green eyes sparkling with amusement.

“Hey,” Sarah whispered unnecessarily. “That’s your sister.”

“Yeah, who’s that guy though?’

Sarah shrugged, “I’ve seen him, but I don’t remember his name.”

“Me either,” Penelope grumbled scowling.

Immediately, Penelope felt an unfamiliar feeling start boiling to life in her belly. It was uncomfortable, but it didn’t make her whole body heat up like anger did. It didn’t tighten Penelope’s throat like sadness, or make her freeze in place with dread like fear. It was, Penelope relented grudgingly, jealousy. Jealousy wasn’t something Penelope felt often. She largely saw herself as superior to many of her classmates and even fellow witches and never really wanted anything that anyone else had because she knew that what she had was better.

But this was the green eyed monster that was more dangerous than the demoness the Parks were supposedly descended from. Why had Maia decided to spend the day with this boy instead of playing with her siblings? She loved them. Penelope was sure of that so why abandon them when they needed her?

Jealousy simmered into anger in Penelope’s chest. An anger that cooled to disbelief as Maia lifted one hand to the boy’s face and leaned forward, meeting his lips in soft kiss. Next to her, Sarah gasped and covered her mouth as Penelope recoiled from the sight not knowing what to feel at this point. Penelope pushed down the feelings and internalized them with a speed that would’ve made her mother proud.

How didn’t she know this boy? Their coven was the largest on the Eastern Coast of the United States. The coven’s children were schooled by their elders, taught in classes arranged by age and magical ability. Penelope knew all of the children her own age like Sarah, but she didn’t pay enough attention to the other families or care enough about them to keep track of all of their members. This boy was obviously older than Penelope or Paris. His hair was black and cropped close to his head and his complexion fell somewhere between Sarah’s and Penelope’s, but he was neither pale or tanned. His smile was easy and charming and familiar…but who in the frilly hell was he?

Maia broke the kiss, smiling so wide that her cheeks had to hurt. Paris and Penelope had once been on the receiving end of such a smile as Maia chased them across the yard and into the greenhouses they weren’t supposed to play in, but always did.

Sarah gasped too loudly next to Penelope, shoulder colliding with Penelope’s as she leaned close to whisper urgently, “I know who he is!”

“Who?”

“Kjartan Morell.”

“Who?” Penelope asked, confused.

Who was that? Morell—Penelope knew that family name because it was written through the last few centuries of her family history in blood. Feuds didn’t usually happen inside of covens. If they did, the fighting families might go their separate ways and start their own covens, but that hadn’t happened in the Coven of the Five Pointed Star. Instead, both the Morells and the Parks had waged a multi-generational war of attrition, one rising to the top in power and wealth until the other knocked them off of their perch.

Philippi Morell had decided to rub out the Parks for good. He had murdered Penelope’s grandfather—his own supposed best friend—in cold blood and his brothers had set fire to the manor house the same evening, killing Penelope’s grandmother, and driving her father into exile.

Philippi had then made an attempt on the Devices after they had taken Achilles and his orphaned siblings in which had left Grandpa Device in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. With the help of Nora, Achilles and his brothers had gotten a taped confession out of Galen Morell that his father and uncles had been behind the attacks on the Parks. The coven leader and their elders had cobbled together a trial resulting in exile for Philippi’s own brothers, but only house arrest for Philippi that lasted until his death. His eldest son, Galen, ran the family now and this boy—Kjartan was it?—was either Galen’s son or the son of his brother, Vesalius.

Penelope couldn’t swallow down the mixture of dread, jealousy, and revulsion she felt as Maia sat up and sat on Kjartan’s lap. Penelope couldn’t have cared less for the blood feud between the Parks and the Morells. It was bound to die out, all it would take was time, but Penelope didn’t like this boy. She didn’t like him, not because of his name or magical bloodline, but because she knew what him dating her sister could mean for Maia.

_Papa’s going to freak out,_ Penelope thought, her stomach dropping.

“Your dad’s going to kill her,” Sarah mumbled, coming to the same realization as she met Penelope’s eyes.

That was it. Penelope could’ve of laughed if she wasn’t repressing a sob and shaking from everything she was feeling. This boy was the whole reason Maia had abandoned Penelope and Paris and not told them where she was going. She couldn’t tell them because she knew she would be in trouble if she did and they—especially Paris—could expose Maia’s meetings with this boy to their parents and then…then…Penelope didn’t know what would happen in all honesty.

Achilles Park could be a violent man. She’d seen him beat up Galen Morell, hiding behind a pillar in their basement last autumn and the images of her father’s bloody fists and face screwed up in rage still scared her. Achilles though had never hit his wife or his children and between Penelope’s parents—he was more of a pushover and more apt to let them get away with flaunting rules in secret—but this?

Would Penelope’s father react well to his eldest daughter—the apple of his eye—dating the grandson of the man who had murdered his father and ordered the killing of his mother?

_Yeah_, Penelope thought, shuddering against the gooseflesh that had suddenly popped up on her exposed arms and legs_. This won’t end well_.

Sarah resettled on her knees so she was closer to Penelope and wouldn’t have to lean over to talk to her, but as her knees stilled back against the dirt, a twig snapped beneath one of her kneecaps and it was the loudest sound in the world. Both of them gasped and looked at one another, terrified.

Maia—who had been playing with what little hair Kjartan had on his head as they kissed lazily—immediately straightened up and stood, Kjartan following her. Penelope huddled closer to Sarah and covered her mouth as if to stifle the nonexistent sound of her breathing.

“Who’s there?” Maia asked, her tone serious and unforgiving in a way Penelope had never heard from her before.

“Maybe it was just a bird or racoon or something, “ Kjartan suggested. “No one comes here, remember? That’s why we come here.”

The boy shrugged, reaching forward to grasp Maia’s hand and presumably to pull her back down to the blanket, but the girl remained standing, green eyes scanning their surroundings.

Maia raised one hand in their direction and Penelope suddenly felt the vines and branches of the bramble they were hiding in wrap around her arms and legs until she couldn’t move. The same thing happened to Sarah beside her, a vine also covering the whimpering girl’s mouth. Penelope’s stomach dropped as the vines and branches suddenly lifted her and Sarah into the air and dangled them three feet from where Maia was standing. Penelope screamed from fear as the branches pulled her up in the air and buoyed her in midair like a mini rollercoaster. When she finally felt safe enough to open her closed eyes, she met a surprised green gaze that mirrored her own.

“Is that your sister and the Elliot girl?” Kjartan asked pointing at them.

Maia sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, but that was apparently answer enough because the branches were soon dropping Penelope and Sarah painfully onto the ground. No sooner had Penelope landed than a hand fisted into her t-shirt and hauled her back up.

“You bratty little tattletales!” Kjartan shook his head, holding Penelope particularly up until her feet were no longer touching the ground.

The raven haired girl was close enough now that she could see the obvious resemblance this boy shared with Galen. Even though the elder Morell’s face had been bloodied and bruised and half shrouded in darkness when Penelope had last seen it, the structure of the man’s cheekbones and jaw matched Kjartan’s though his eyes weren’t blue, but black and seething with anger.

“Kjartan!”

Maia was shouting at him, but Kjartan ignored her, instead choosing to wind his freehand around Penelope’s small neck where it fit easily.

“Did your crazy bastard of a father send you out here to spy on us? Huh?!”

Kjartan shook her. He was young, but older than Penelope had originally thought—at least sixteen—and his sinewy arms were corded with sleek muscle that was such a contrast to that of her father’s more athletic physique that for some reason, Penelope’s brain was choosing that to focus on instead of the face of the enraged boy holding her up.

“Answer me, damn you!” Kjartan yelled in her face, but his attention shifted from her when the vines that had delivered Penelope and Sarah into this mess crawled up his legs to hold him where he was.

He let out a deep breath and looked over towards Maia whose eyes blazed with green fire as the vines held him in place.

“Drop her,” Maia ordered, tone brokering no argument.

Kjartan looked at her—confusion warring with anger, betrayal and indignation—before he clenched his jaw and released Penelope from his grasp. Penelope fell on the ground, the world going out of focus for a moment. When she sat up again, Kjartan was laid out on the ground and Paris was standing in front of her, fists held up.

“Stay away from my sisters, jackass!” Paris shouted.

Penelope turned around when Sarah knelt down beside her. Had she gone for help? Had she just run back and forth from here to the lake and back again just to get their brothers who weren’t even big enough to really be able to help them?

Penelope—for once—had underestimated Paris. He may have been all of ten, but somehow he had managed to punch Kjartan in the nose because the teenager’s nose was bloody and he was looking at Paris as if he was ready to beat him into the ground. Kjartan didn’t get that far though. He took a step forward towards Paris, but before he could loom over him, Maia grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. The way she was looking at him—there was anger there for sure but something else was hiding in those eyes that Penelope couldn’t put a name to at first—sorrow.

“Please, Kjartan, don’t hurt him,” Maia pleaded, voice as soft as it usually was.

“You’re backing up these brats? Instead of your own boyfriend?”

“I’m not choosing anyone’s side!,” Maia fumed.

As they argued, Sarah and Rune helped Penelope up, both of them standing a little in front of her. Paris stepped back mumbling, “Boyfriend?”

“I knew this wasn’t going to work! You and your whole damn family are fucking nutcases!”

“Kjartan, wait!”

“Fuck off!” Kjartan shouted back and then he disappeared through the leaves at the other side of the clearing.

Maia folded her arms around her stomach and hunched over as if she was going to be sick. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she looked like she was struggling to breathe. Penelope stepped forward, wanting to comfort her, but Maia shrugged out of her grasp once her eyes were open again.

“Let’s just go home,” Maia said, her tone darker than usual, but not mean.

Sarah rubbed Penelope’s shoulder as they walked back, not stopping at the lake to retrieve their towels or their toys, instead walking all the way back to Park Manor in silence.

That night, Penelope’s father came back from his business trip and entered the dining room to find his children in varying states of distress. Maia hadn’t even bothered to touch her food. Her head was being cradled in her hands until she heard their father’s footsteps come down the hall. Penelope sat in the chair next to Maia, hands gripping the wooden frame of the chair beneath her to keep her from reacting to the situation. It was Paris though who looked the most…crestfallen. His expression alone should have been enough to rouse suspicion, but when Achilles set eyes on the bruised and bloodied knuckles of one of the boy’s small hands, he knew that something had happened.

Maia—like Paris—couldn’t lie. So when Achilles had shouted at Paris to tell him what happened, Maia had confessed that everything was her fault and ushered him into their kitchen where she told him the story of what had happened that afternoon. Penelope and Paris had taken the opportunity to slink around the kitchen and hide in the pantry where they could listen in on and witness the entire scene as it unfolded.

Achilles’ expression went from confusion to surprise to anger to grief back to anger again before Maia’s story was done. He was quiet at first, so quiet that Maia looked afraid of what was coming.

“Papa?” Maia called to him meekly.

Achilles slammed his fist down into the metal top of the dishwasher forcefully, leaving a dent in the stainless steel and causing all of his children to flinch. His eyes were closed and he…was their father crying? Penelope perked up, standing on her tip toes on the shelf she'd climbed up onto and leaning on Paris who was crouching on the floor near her feet so she could get a better look at her father’s face.

“Papa,” Maia pleaded, already feeling his pain even from five feet away. Empath though she was, it wasn’t useful in situations like this. “Papa, please…please forgive me…”

When Achilles looked back up, his face was red, bright red and he looked so angry that he couldn’t even speak. He braced his body against the kitchen island, struggling to breathe. There was a vein visible on his forehead that Penelope hadn’t even known was there that pulsed as he clenched his jaw.

“She’s so grounded..” Paris whispered in sympathy.

Penelope swallowed because being grounded was the least of Maia’s problems right now. Maia stepped closer apprehensively like she wanted to hug their father because she knew he was in pain, but she also looked a little afraid to do so. Their father flinched away though and she stopped moving forward. His green eyes—the ones he shared with Penelope and Maia—were an unnatural emerald shade and his voice when he spoke was hoarse with emotion.

“How….how…dare—,” Achilles began, but he had to stop to clear his throat and keep it from closing up. He paused and hunched over in a close approximation of Maia circa five hours ago in the clearing, then he straightened back up, eyes red with tears in them. “Listen to me, Maia, here’s what you’re going to do. From now on, don’t even glance in that boy’s direction, do you hear me? Don’t talk to him, don’t listen if talked to, if you see him as school, make it known that you don’t want to see him again.”

Maia gasped, as if breathing were suddenly painful for her, “But Papa—.”

Achilles stepped forward, taking Maia’s face gently in his hands and staring into her eyes, “Promise me Maia. Be my daughter in this one thing, promise me.”

Maia sniffed, not able to hold back her own tears, “But Papa I am your daughter.”

Their father’s hands fell from Maia’s face as he took a step back, “Not if you continue your association with this boy, you’re not.”

Achilles’ voice cracked over the words, but he said them all the same and didn’t take them back.

“He’s not like his father, Papa….Kjartan, he loves me…”

“Loves you?!” Achilles’ voice rose sharply in anger. “What about how he acted today says, ‘I love you and I mean your family well?’ He almost snapped your poor sister’s neck and he would’ve beaten your little brother to death without thinking twice about it! Nothing about that speaks of love! Once upon a time, my father—who was kind, generous and naïve just like you—thought a Morell was his best friend. We called him ‘Uncle Philippi,’ in this house and that man—that fond uncle who gave us homemade candies on Christmas and stood next to my father at his wedding to my mother—that man stabbed my father in the back, over and over and over again before pushing him into a river then sent his brothers to murder the rest of us under cover of darkness! So believe me when I tell you, darling girl, that boy does not love you and he is not worthy of you and you will not continue to see him! Have I made myself clear?!”

“Whoa,” Leo’s awed voice travelled from the direction of the main entrance to the kitchen and filled the hollow space like liquid filling a jar.

Penelope leaned further away from her shelf so she could see him through the crack in the door, standing uncertainly in the entryway in a black denim jacket and matching jeans, Nora beside him. Their mother’s driver must have dropped her off at the door, but no one had heard her come in because all of them were so focused on what was going on in the kitchen.

Their father continued to stare at Maia, breathing heavily from his shouting like he’d just run a marathon.

“Achilles?” Nora asked, stepping carefully into the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

Achilles turned towards his wife and jerked his thumb back towards Maia, “Did you know about this?”

Nora didn’t answer verbally, taking in their surroundings and mentally gauging the situation based on everything that was happening. Achilles didn’t wait for her to talk. His eyes moved to Leo—who was by far their father’s least favorite of his children—and his eyes narrowed accusingly.

“What about you, Deucalion? You—easily the most underwhelming of my children—did you know about any of this?”

Leo was as tall as Achilles, but all of his features took after Nora. He was sinewy, dark, and contemplative and he despised their father as much as their father seemed to despise him, but he also feared Achilles and wasn’t likely to get into the middle of any of this, even if it did concern Maia.

“Answer me, boy,” Achilles snapped sharply, eyes zeroing in on the eldest son he could never reconcile himself to.

Leo straightened at the tone in their father’s voice and Paris started shaking by Penelope’s side in fear of what might be coming. Leo opened his mouth, but their mother stopped him from speaking by placing a hand gently upon his shoulder and stepping in front of him so their father had no choice but to focus on her now.

“And what is it you think we should know about, beloved?” Nora countered calmly.

The perfectly emphasized pet name didn’t calm Achilles at all, but some of the hot air seemed to have gone out beneath his wings as he had to stop himself, breathe, and explain.

“About our Maia and Kjartan Morell getting hot and heavy in some clearing somewhere while we were away!” Achilles shouted it like it was a statement of obvious fact and not something he wouldn’t have known an hour ago.

“Papa!” Maia shouted, mortified.

“Oh, snap!” Leo exclaimed, grinning at Maia. “Look who finally got busted!” 

“Leo shut up! Oh my god!” Maia yelled, covering her tomato red face with her hands.

At the height of chaos, Nora sauntered into the kitchen and placed a hand against Achille’s chest—holding him still.

“Maia, Leo, both of you go to your rooms,” Nora said in that tone they all knew wasn’t a question. “Now.”

Maia scurried out into the hall and Leo bounded after her, more entertained by her embarrassment than anything else. Achilles sighed, taking deep steadying breaths over and over. Once he’d calmed down, one of Nora’s hands caressed his face.

“What happened?”

Achilles rolled his neck casually, but his tone was anything but. “Maia ran out after breakfast this morning to meet with Kjartan Morell in the clearing that marks the border between our estates. Penelope and Paris—left to their own devices—naturally wandered off. Luckily, this time they went to the Elliots and asked to play with them like normal children instead of masterminding some sort of shenanigans. Paris and Penelope were at the lake with the Elliot kids, they got bored went exploring and found our errant teenager and that fucking Morell boy together. How—how does she not understand the dangerous consequences to her actions?”

Nora smiled a knowing smile that often put Achilles at ease, “As I remember, neither one of us thought too deeply on the consequences of our actions when we eloped together.”

“That’s different,” Achilles huffed indignantly. “Your family didn’t murder mine, but Kjartan’s did. I couldn’t do anything when Philippi Morell killed my father because I wasn’t there. I couldn’t save my mother from having her heart ripped out of her chest because I was nine, but I can save our daughter and I’ll be damned if that boy lays hands on her ever again.”

Nora bit her lip, but wove her arms around Achilles’ neck all the same, regarding him with eyebrows raised, “And how do you plan to do that?”

Achilles met Nora’s dark eyes, looking surprised and a little guilty as he pried Nora’s arms from him, “Nothing I’m proud of. I’m going to visit my brothers, don’t wait up for me.”

Nora narrowed her gaze at their father’s back as Achilles went down the back stairs and out of the back door. Penelope was carefully climbing down from the shelves of the pantry in the dark, but one of her feet slipped on a bag of something and she fell to the ground with a pained yell. Her falling pushed Paris off balance and his body fell against the door, opening the pantry fully. The light in the pantry was turned on with a click exposing brother and sister sprawled ungracefully out on the stone tile floor between spilled onions and sweet potatoes. Penelope closed her eyes, fully expecting yelling and a lecture and crying from Paris—but the admonishments never came.

Instead, she opened her eyes to their mother standing in the doorway, laughing at them like a mad woman.


	8. Melusine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Meet the Parks," or "Crap hits the fan part 1."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pronunciation Guide:
> 
> Achilles= A-kill-EES  
Laomedon= La-me-don  
Eumaeus= U-may-us  
Oenone = O-no-nee  
Kjartan = Kee-AR-tan  
Melusine= Mel-U-seen  
Device = Dev-is
> 
> Enjoy!

_Once upon a time, the only son of a French count went hunting in his father’s forest._

_A few hours into the hunt, he comes upon a woman who is beyond beautiful with glittering green and gold eyes beckoning to him as she sits alone near a sacred spring. The man falls in love at first sight with this woman and begs her to marry him. The woman is wily and does not agree right away. Instead, she makes the man swear—that if she marries him—he will not force her to go to mass on Sundays when she comes to the sacred spring to bathe with her sisters._

_The count’s son readily agrees to this simple condition and he and the woman are married. They live together for many years, have many children, and grow rich off of the family’s land. The son succeeds the father as count and is happy, but he becomes suspicious of his wife after his relatives start questioning why she does not accompany him and their children to mass. The count begins to believe that his wife is being unfaithful to him so one Sunday morning, he follows her back through the woods to the sacred spring where he watches her step into the water whereupon her feet transformed into a serpent’s tail as she joined her sisters. _

_The count was horrified and his fearful shout was overheard by the countess, his wife, whose green eyes blazed at him with fury before she swam away from him faster than any fish with her sisters once she spotted her husband’s betrayal. _

_The countess—a water spirit also variously described as a demoness in other sources—was named Melusine. Her husband, Count Geoffrey, had been the illegitimate son of a Count Domfront and a laundress. Geoffrey’s mother gave birth to him on the open game lands of his father’s estate and therefore the boy was given a nickname, ‘le Parc.’ Geoffrey’s children also took on this moniker thus perpetuating it. ‘Le Parc,’ became ‘Parke,’ sometime after the count’s sons entered England with William the Conqueror in 1066. The descendants of Geoffrey Le Parc and Melusine were infamous, known for their passionate tempers, ferocious love, and quarrelsome natures. All women in the Park family inherited Melusine’s green-gold eyes as well as a further portion of her power than their brothers, fathers, or sons inherited—though no one quite knew why. _

_Melusine herself was said to watch over the women in her bloodline—whom she would help if ever called upon—but there was also a monstrous component to her relationship to her descendants. It was said, that in order for the she-demon to retain immortal life in a mortal world, she needed to take powerful nourishment. And her chosen nourishment was the powerful magic that ran in the veins of her mortal descendants. Once one of them departed the realm of the living, Melusine would appear to collect the individual’s power before it could disperse unused into the world and—if the chosen descendant wasn’t powerful enough—the she-demon might even devour their soul. But the demoness did have her own great power. She could heal wounds with one touch and cure curses with her blood. Some stories even said that she could breathe life back into the recently dead._

_Well into the 20th Century, the progeny of the demoness Melusine were known as the, “blood of the she-demon…” or “spawn of the demoness.”_

This story was depicted on hundreds of tapestries—many of which—still hung on the walls of Park Manor. Instead of the usual fairy tales, the story of Melusine and Count Geoffrey Le Parc, was often recounted to Penelope and her siblings before bedtime in their earliest days so that by the age of 7, Penelope could recite it easily from memory. But unlike her father, the raven haired girl didn’t recite the story with any sort of feeling—no pride, no enjoyment, or amusement—just rote repetition. To Penelope—the story of their legendary ancestor was just that—a story—nothing more. 

But school unfortunately was all too real. 

To Penelope, the only downside to being a Park or even just a witch in a coven like theirs was the peculiar way in which the kids were educated. Since their lessons were private and taught only to children in their community or children of friends of the community, they were year round. Summer and spring breaks weren’t mandated like they were in state schools though they did get weekends off like most non-magical students.

When Penelope woke up the day after the, ‘Kjartan Incident,’ her uncles’ cars were parked around their circular driveway at varying intervals of crookedness between cobblestones and carefully manicured grass (something their mother would have made them regret if she hadn’t left early to drive Leo back to the pretentious boarding school she had always insisted he go to). Penelope though couldn’t fault her mother’s infamous self-preservation instincts for urging her to escape the suffocating feeling of solemnity that had taken over the entire house like a possessed spirit since the previous evening.

It was only Penelope, Paris, and Maia at the breakfast table that morning. None of the three spoke as they ate the ridiculously sugary cereal they only pulled out from its hiding place in the pantry when their mother wasn’t there to scold them for it. The special treat usually made them happy—or hyper at the very least—and those were always the starts of good days, but not on this day. On this day, Maia wasn’t eating her cereal, just lifting it up with her spoon and letting it splash lacklusterly back down into the earthernware bowl in front of her.

Paris had been working up the courage to ask Maia how she was feeling, but he was interrupted before he could even get started as one of the kitchen’s double doors was pushed open. Mae—the head of their household staff who was the keeper of all of their childhood secrets and kinder to them than Nora was usually—came into the dining room wiping her hands on her apron before she looked up at the clock on the wall and all but pushed Paris and Penelope out the front door with their backpacks being thrown out after them.

Penelope and Paris shared a look before Paris shrugged, retrieved his backpack and raced down the stone steps. When Penelope got to the dark slate flagstone walkway that would carry her to the long drive that led down to the road, she paused. Their father and two of his three brothers were standing in front of the double iron gate, whose doors when closed held a seal in the middle that showed the angry face of a woman encircled by her sea-serpent tail—the imagined likeness of the legendary demoness, Melusine herself whose blood gave the Parks their magic and power.

Their Uncle Laomedon stood nearest the fieldstone columns that operated the gates electronically. He was—even though it was easily eighty degrees outside already—in his gigantic leather jacket that even their father swam in when he tried it on. Lamedon was the eldest of Achilles’s siblings. He was as tall as their father and bulky in a solidly built way reminiscent of a pro-wrestler. His hair was already silver mixed with gray—even though he was only in his forties—and his eyes were a clear blue that somehow made him even more intimidating to almost everyone else. He was a, ‘bruiser,’ as Penelope had heard him described once before in polite conversation and he was hands down the scariest of her uncles in her opinion even though he insisted on wearing Amiri designer jeans, exactingly tailor Italian suits, and handmade Italian shoes.

Nevertheless—to a 7 year old—Uncle Laomedon seemed like a real life giant and only when he caught sight of Paris and Penelope approaching, did he smile, blue eyes shining out from a broad face.

“Good morning, munchkins.”

Penelope murmured a half-hearted, ‘good morning,’ to her uncle, but Paris attention was all on their father as he walked up and leaned on him slightly.

“Papa, why do we have to go to school all summer when kids in the city get summers off?” Paris asked.

It was more whine than mere curiosity and—though Penelope wasn’t a complainer in general—she agreed with him on the inside. School in the summer sucked. Paris yawned wide without covering his mouth then winced when Uncle Laomedon punched him in the shoulder lightly.

“Suck it up buttercup,” Laomedon said, mussing Paris’s meticulously styled hair with one giant hand. “That’s just the way it is.”

The tone of the exchange shifted as their Uncle Uli snuffed out the cigarette he had been smoking a little away from the group on the cobblestones of the driveway before walking up and joining them. ‘Uli’—short for Eumaeus—was tall too, but almost unhealthily skinny with dark rimmed glasses and—surprisingly—a farmer’s tan. Today he wore an orange polo shirt and white cargo shorts which—in contrast with the sleek three piece suits he favored in general—made his legs look like toothpicks almost too thin to support anyone let alone a grown man. His clean cut black hair was cropped like normal though and silvered through with growing grey.

Uli was Penelope’s favorite uncle on her father’s side. Like her he was quiet, observant, and contemplative in personality and he never made fun of Penelope for choosing solitude over playing with her peers like her other uncles did. When Uli joined the group, his eyes naturally gravitated towards Penelope and he gave her a slight smile in greeting before he turned to Achilles, expression souring.

“Do we have him?” Uli asked quietly, but not quietly enough for the kids not to hear.

Laomedon answered before their father could, voice not quiet at all, a chuckle prefacing his words, “That boy struts around like a peacock. It wasn’t hard to grab him off the street. Oh, I almost forgot.”

Laomedon reached into one of the deep pockets of his leather jacket and tossed something decently sized and black at their father’s chest, which he caught and quickly tried hide behind his leg. Penelope recognized the Ravenclaw phone case though as the phone flipped in midair because Maia had had it special ordered when their parents had given her the phone. Paris didn’t seem to notice, but a sinking feeling of dread settled into Penelope’s bones and it was as chilling as the winter cold. She shivered before tuning into the rest of the conversation.

“Have you heard from, Oenone?” their father asked.

Uli nodded mutely and fished his blackberry out of his shorts’ pocket, “Yeah, she says, and I quote, ‘Broke speed limit. Ran state trooper off road. You fix later. Be there in 5.”

Uli smiled wryly when he looked up from the screen as Laomedon belly laughed and Achilles smirked, muttering a curse under his breath though despite his obvious amusement.

“Aunt Nonie’s coming for a visit?” Paris perked up, standing back up on his own two feet fully, noticeably more awake than he had ben second before.

Oenone—Aunt Nonie for simplification’s sake to the kids—was their father’s only sister. She was about as tall as their mother with coal dark hair and the Park signature gold-green eyes all women born into the family had. She was beautiful and charming in Penelope’s opinion though those were the most understated of her talents, Penelope knew. Nonie was as tough as any of her brothers and more than a match for them in power and personality. She was also the only member of their family who lived off of coven land, routinely crossing state lines to the detriment of the local citizenry in pursuit of criminals who either skipped out on their bail or broke the conditions of their parole.

Because she was always somewhere, Aunt Nonie rarely visited except for on the major holidays. She had visited them last on the night the coven celebrated the Winter solstice intermingled with a bastardization of the capitalist Christmas holiday. Nonie had shown up to the party at the compound late—much to their mother’s annoyance—and had only stayed for an hour because she said she had some guy tied up and gaged stuffed in the trunk of her Jaguar that she needed to deliver to the Boston City PD before the New Years deadline. Achilles squeezed Paris’s shoulder, bringing them both back to the present.

“She won’t be staying very long, son,” their father said in a sympathetic tone as the boy visibly deflated in front of everyone.

Just then a bright blue Ford Mustang ’68 roared through the open gate almost running Laomedon over and clipping his favorite Italian ankle boots as he leapt for the safety of the grass.

“Christ!” Laomedon yelled, scrambling back onto his feet angrily as he Mustang spun loose dirt in his general direction and kept going until it was only a few feet from the manor house.

Achilles remained impassive as Laomedon continued to curse not so quietly beside them, swatting dirt from the legs of his designer jeans, but Uli grinned. The Mustang was parked and turned off. Then one sky blue vertical door rose upon the car’s driver side and out stepped their Aunt Nonie in a pair of off the rack ripped jeans, a weathered aviator jacket, and what looked like steel toed boots. Sunglasses obscured the green eyes all Park women inherited from their legendary ancestor, Melusine, but her refined nose, high forehead, and soft jawline were reminiscent of Maia only older and fairer.

“Learn to drive you crazy bitch!” Laomedon fumed, his face red with sudden anger.

Nonie did even flinch at the outburst, readjusting the dark sunglasses on the bridge of her nose so she could see over the rims.

“Nice boots, big brother,” their aunt observed with a wink. “Louis Vuitton?”

Laomedon let out a loud exhale, posture relaxing as his anger dissipated just as quickly as it had come, “Gucci.”

Nonie noticed Penelope and Paris just as Paris was about to barrel into her with a bear hug.

“Hey kiddos—oof!” their aunt stumbled back as Paris threw his whole body weight at her. She rebalanced herself quickly before returning his embrace and making another attempt at a greeting. “Hey, hey there little man! You’ve gotten stronger, I think. Hey Shiny Penny! Did you little squirts miss me?”

Penelope nodded, but Paris’s over enthusiastic, ‘yes,’ drowned out the gesture.

“Paris, let go of your aunt,” Achilles ordered sternly. “You both need to get going or you’ll be late and I am not in the mood to be lectured by Elder Maxim this morning.”

Paris whimpered and kicked at the flawless green grass that their mother was so proud of as he turned around and asked, “But what about Maia?”

Their father’s monotone answer wasn’t comforting, but it was surprising.

“Maia’s staying home sick today.”

Paris looked to Penelope wide eyed probably hoping for reassurances, but Penelope didn’t have any so she looked at Achilles for them. Their father wasn’t actually paying attention to them. Instead, his steely gold-green stare was focused on their aunt. His expression was somewhere between practiced indifference and disapproval though Penelope couldn’t think of why.

“But Papa—”

Achilles’s green-gold eyes hardened as they shifted to Paris who was looking pathetic and pity-worthy, “No, buts, Paris. Get over here now.”

Paris looked back up at their Aunt Nonie who smiled at him before he made any indication of moving, “Will you be here when we get home from school?”

Nonie’s gaze—gray and green instead of gold and green—flickered briefly up to their father before it focus back on Paris, backed up by a soft smile and a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Sure, yeah,” Nonie nodded shrugging with minimal certainty.

“Promise?” Paris persisted, pleading brown eyes pinning their aunt until she sighed in apparent defeat.

“Alright, alright, I’ll be here,” Nonie conceded finally with a melodramatic roll of her eyes.

“Yes!” Paris cheered.

He did a little leap into the air before running back towards Penelope and their dad. Achilles continued to stare at his sister and—contrary to his earlier insistence—made no immediate move to walk them to their first lesson at the main compound—a four story building that was the residence and office of the coven leader and occasionally his chief advisor. The expression on her father’s face was similar to the one Penelope had seen him wear the previous evening while he had been denouncing Kjartan very loudly to Maia, but it was fleeting, melding into a scowl almost as quickly as Penelope had made the connection between the two.

Tentatively, Penelope reached out and held Achilles hand. He startled almost, snapping his attention to her oddly as though he had almost forgotten Penelope was even there at all. Penelope dismissed the sting the thought of being forgotten had blossomed in her chest, giving her papa a genuine and supportive smile.

“Why don’t you let me walk them, brother?” Uncle Uli volunteered genially. “It’s on my way to my meeting with Coven Leader Elliot anyway. Come on, Paris; Penelope.”

Uli started walking out the gate at a leisurely pace and into the road without waiting for Achilles’s permission. Paris looked briefly at their father and when there was no objection, he jogged after their uncle, backpack bouncing on his shoulders. Then Achilles looked down to Penelope and—for the rarest of moments—he gave her a short, sweet smile before squeezing her hand and inclining his head in the direction Uli and Paris had just gone in.

“Bye Pop-pop,” the nickname Penelope used to call their father before she could properly say the word, ‘Papa,’ slipping out of the girl’s mouth before she could stop it.

Penelope’s ears burned in embarrassment as she sprinted to catch up to her brother and uncle. She looked back briefly behind her before she passed beyond the gate, but no one was laughing at her childish mistake like she had expected. Instead, Achilles had turned his back to her, already stalking back towards the house as Laomedon pulled on a pair of leather gloves Penelope hadn’t seen him wear before while pointing Aunt Nonie’s attention with both occupied hands towards the old carriage house that sat dilapidated and forgotten in the long grasses two or so miles adjacent to the main house. Things seemed to move in slow motion as her eidetic memory committed every detail to the colourful tapestry of images in her mind, but before Penelope could overthink any of them and what they meant, Paris’s annoyed voice carried back to her, calling her name. 

“Penny, what are you doing? You’re going to make us late, short stop!”

“Don’t call me that!”

Penelope passed the gate finally, sprinting with renewed determination to kick Paris in the butt before they got to school and there were witnesses who would tattle on her.


	9. What It Means To Be A Park

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penelope discovers what it really means to be a Park or, "Crap hits the fan part 2."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pronunciation Guide:
> 
> Achilles= A-kill-EES  
Laomedon= La-me-don  
Eumaeus= U-may-us  
Oenone = O-no-nee  
Kjartan = Kee-AR-tan  
Melusine= Mel-U-seen  
Device = Dev-is
> 
> Enjoy!

“Do you ever think about how weird it is that my dad was supposed to marry your mom a long time ago?”

The abstract question—as always—came from Sarah Elliot as she waited in the doorway to the mudroom where the kids of ages 5-10 kept their backpacks and jackets in personalized cubbies during lessons as Penelope struggled with a stubborn shoelace on one of her doc martens on the painted wooden floor. It was unusual to see the youngest Park girl openly upset over anything, but this shoelace—which was loose while the knot was tight, needing to be retied—had stymied Penelope into quiet frustration as she stubbornly struggled against the double knot at the end that was tied so tight now that she couldn’t get it out.

“No,” Penelope ground out the answer, her tone colored by her mounting exasperation at the task she was so publically failing at.

They’d made it through four lessons, had their lunch, and had been let out early to go home and enjoy what was left of the summer afternoon. Paris had grabbed his things and sped back out by them before Penelope or Sarah had even changed out from the slippers they were all required to wear in this part of the compound back into their shoes. That wasn’t unusual for him, though Paris generally liked to talk and walk with his many friends and play stupid competitive games with them on the long way back to their assorted homes. Today though, Paris had sped out of the school like a bat out of a lit chimney, probably hoping to catch their aunt before she inevitably left again for who knows where.

Most of the other kids stepped on and around Penelope as she got more and more frustrated until it was only her and Sarah Elliot left in the room together. The blonde watched Penelope struggle valiantly for a few more minutes before she spoke again.

“My mom calls your mom, ‘the gorgon,’ at home,” Sarah admitted in a bored tone as she shifted from foot to foot.

Penelope pulled on the knotted shoelace until she was red in the face and the knot had tightened so much due to her actions that she finally let it go with a defeated sigh, tucking the shoelace into her ankle sock before grabbing her backpack and standing up.

“We call our mother that too sometimes,” Penelope shrugged, leading the way out the side entrance that opened up into a large yard that included a playground.

The kids outside were of varying ages, doing acrobatic flips off of enchanted monkey bars and tossing basketballs through levitating hoops. Leaning against the first post of the rough wooden fence surrounding the playground stood Edward Elliot in his usual dark grey sports coat and trousers. His hair was a sandy gold that looked red sometimes in the sunlight. Penelope’s favorite thing about the man was that he had kind eyes and smiled a thin lipped—but genuine—smile when he noticed Penelope and his youngest daughter walking out of the compound together.

“Daddy!” Sarah squealed excitedly at the surprise visit, running towards him.

Edward Elliot laughed, squatted low to the ground and caught his daughter easily, lifting her above his head when she was within reach and twirling her around before planting her back onto her feet and taking her hand. Sarah looked back behind her and waved a short goodbye to Penelope before starting down the road with her dad.

Alone now, Penelope watched them go, holding onto the shoulder straps of her backpack as she wandered through her own musings. Had Penelope’s father ever twirled her around like that, laughing and holding her close? She had a foggy, but solid memory of Achilles holding her against his chest in some room of their house that had a fireplace when she was much, much younger. It had a fireplace, Penelope recalled, because the orange glow of the flames had brought out the gold lines in her father’s eyes as he kissed her cheek in a rare show of affection and told Penelope how she was the most beautiful girl in all the world.

Fingers snapped loudly and impatiently somewhere close to her head as Penelope focused back on the here and now. She stepped away from the sound and looked in that direction to see her Aunt Nonie standing beside her, looking at her with one eyebrow raised at her in curiously.

“You good, kiddo?”

“Yeah,” Penelope answered, blinking away her surprise at the interruption. “What are you doing here?”

Her aunt shrugged, “Nice to see you too. I was in the neighborhood and I was kind of thinking that you and I could spend some quality aunt-niece bonding time together on the walk back home. What do you say?”

Penelope nodded once, but her words relayed her obvious confusion. “But Paris ran ahead so he could make it home before you left.”

Nonie and Penelope started walking on the gravel walkway beside the main circular road that enclosed the compound, other main roads branching out at various intervals so that—from the air—their coven’s collective acreage looked to be in the shape of a gigantic pentagram.

“Did he? I didn’t see him on my walk here,” Nonie answered, with a shrug. “Are you sure he didn’t stop off at one of his friend’s houses along the way?”

That was possible, Penelope conceded to herself. Paris was gregarious and easily distracted, but he had been beyond excited to see Aunt Nonie again. For whatever reason, he’d really taken to her after her first visit when they were younger and every time their aunt came over now, Paris all but levitated off of the ground to gain as much of her attention as he could for himself. Penelope had absented herself from all of that nonsense, not feeling the need to compete for the attention of one person whom they maybe saw once or twice a year for an hour, if that. Penelope had noted at the Christmas party—that her aunt spent no more than ten minutes in any room where Achilles was and when they were in the same rooms together, they never said more than a handful of words to one another—though Penelope couldn’t understand why that was. 

“Paris will probably be waiting for us at the house by the time we get there,” Nonie reassured, sticking her hands in her jean pockets as she walked.

Penelope nodded, but didn’t say anything back. She felt her aunt’s eyes scrutinizing her as they made their way back to the Park estate and didn’t know how to feel about. She didn’t have it in her to make small talk and she knew it wasn’t prudent to be rude when it was just the two of them walking home together.

“So…” Nonie drew out the word, struggling herself trying to figure out how to breach the silence between them. “You’re pretty talkative aren’t you? You must take after your Uncle Uli more than Achilles.”

“Yeah,” Penelope agreed with a shrug, “but I’m not shy or afraid of talking to people. I just don’t like talking to someone unless they’re worth talking to.”

Nonie shook her head fondly with a smirk that suddenly reminded Penelope of Maia back at home for some reason she couldn’t name, “You have the green eyes of the Parks, but you speak like a mini-Nora Device. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything less considering who your parents are. Have you ever fenced before?”

Penelope wrinkled up her nose at the random question, “As in the building of fences or the sport with swords?”

Nonie giggled, hands resettling in her back pockets as she ambled along at a pace that was slower than Paris and Penelope usually moved at, “The latter.”

Penelope shook her head, “Nope.”

“Perfect. I’ll have to give you a saber lesson the next time I come to visit. Every self-respecting woman should know how to use a sword.”

“Mom says the same thing only about fireballs,” Penelope commented.

Nonie snorted in amusement, “I bet she does. Your mother has always been fond of fire, but to be fair it has always served her well in the past.”

“Why are you here?” Penelope asked, trying not to sound rude, but she didn’t know how else to phrase the question in a way that wouldn’t feel weird or be taken the wrong way.

Her aunt snorted again, “Cutting and to the point. You truly are Nora’s daughter, you know that?”

Penelope’s eyebrows furrowed together as she looked up at Nonie like she was stupid, “Why wouldn't I be my mother’s daughter?”

Nonie was quick to shake her head, “No reason. You and your mom share a lot of your personality traits. That’s all I meant by it.”

“So, is that why you’re here?” Penelope asked. “To tell me how alike my mom and I are?”

“Patience, young one. Jesus,” Nonie said rolling her eyes at Penelope’s persistence or her lack of a filter, either or. “Okay, so I meant what I said earlier. You and I haven’t spent a lot of time together over the years and I want to get to know you better. Also, I wanted to speak to you about a few things, but before we dive into that sinkhole, I want you to know that whoever you are; whatever you become in later life, know that I will be here to accept you always.”

Penelope looked up at her aunt again, but the warm smile beaming down on her like sunlight made her ears burn at the attention so she lowered her head to watch the pathway ahead of her for obstacles.

“Thanks, I guess,” Penelope mumbled. What was she supposed to say to something like that?

It was Penelope’s turn for random questions, “Who are you named after?”

“The first wife of Prince Paris of Troy,” Nonie admitted with a shrug. “There are worse people to be named after, I suppose.”

Penelope gripped her shoulder straps so they didn’t chafe against the skin under her arms, exposed by the sleeveless polo she was wearing, “What’s her story?”

Nonie snorted again, the expression of amusement apparently being a common one for her, “It’s short and sad. Do you still want me to tell it?”

Penelope raised one dark eyebrow in a, ‘are-you-kidding-me,’ kind of look, “Most stories are sad, but not always short. You of all people should know that a Park can never remain innocent for long.”

“Ha!” Nonie laughed out loud good naturedly, apparently enjoying being schooled by a child and her niece yet besides, “Well said, kiddo. You took the words right out of my cranium.”

Penelope raised both of her eyebrows, waiting, not at all patiently. Aunt Nonie’s grin only grew wider at that before finally she relented.

“Oenone was a mountain nymph, though who her parents are supposed to be often varies depending upon which ancient author you’re reading. What is universally acknowledged is that the exiled Trojan prince, Paris—whose family had exposed him as an infant on the mountainside where a simple herdsman saved him—quickly fell in love with her. For a time, they were happy and even had a child together,” Nonie recounted, solemnly. “Then one night Paris—having awarded the golden apple of Discord to Aphrodite the previous day—set out under cover of darkness to claim his promised prize. In the city of Troy, he competed in the summer games, determined that he would win with a goddess’s backing. But the asshat lost—badly in fact—to King Priam’s eldest son, Hector, but during the fight he was somehow recognized as the exiled prince and officially adopted as a member of the royal family. After some cursory training, Paris was sent to Sparta as an envoy to the court of King Menelaus. You know what came of that, right?”

Penelope nodded. Everyone knew the outline of the story of the Trojan War—or some convoluted version of it from a TV miniseries or blockbuster movie that seemed to come out every decade or so.

Her aunt continued, “The morning after Paris left Oenone and their son behind, Oenone predicted that the Trojan War would come to pass and everyone would suffer because of Paris’s selfishness. Despite everything though, Oenone still loved her unfaithful husband as much as she resented him. In the last year of the war, Paris was wounded and managed to climb up to his former home with Oenone, begging her to help him, but she refused. Paris died on the cliff and was burnt on a funeral pyre by the community of shepherds he had lived among before going to Troy. During the funeral, Oenone was so distraught and filled with remorse that she threw herself upon the pyre so she could go with her husband into the afterlife. Uplifting right?”

Penelope giggled, “Yeah, it’s like the Princess Bride of Greek myths.”

“It is,” Nonie chuckled wryly.

It wasn’t really funny or it shouldn’t have been, but for some reason Penelope felt closer to her aunt after listening to the story of her unfortunate namesake and joking about it. The rest of the walk back to the Park estate was quiet, but not awkwardly so. Walking down the long driveway leading to the circle of concrete everyone parked in, Penelope could hear an odd sound. It wasn’t foreign really, but at the same time she couldn’t place the sound without seeing what was causing it.

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack…

Just a few feet away from the circular roundabout next to the house, Aunt Nonie reached out and placed a hand on Penelope’s shoulder to stop her.

“Shiny Penny, hold up a sec,” Nonie knelt beside Penelope so they were at face level, gray-green eyes staring intently into Penelope’s in a way that was almost intrusive, but not quite. “Has Achilles—has your father explained to you what it means to be a Park—especially here?”

Penelope thought back to what her father had told her in the crypt beneath the house when she’d found him beating Galen Morell to a colorful pulp and grown afraid—unable to reconcile the violent man who beat someone until they were unconscious with the reality of the man who used to tuck her into bed at night with a tender smile Penelope liked to think he reserved only for her.

_We’re Parks, Penelope_ _, Her Papa had said._ _ We make the hard choices. We do the things other people can’t live with or even imagine doing, not because we enjoy it, but because it’s what is necessary for the family to survive._

Penelope nodded, “I think so.”

“You think so?” Nonie repeated, unconvinced. “Darling girl, if your father had told you then you would definitely know for sure. What did Achilles say to you?”

“Papa said that we make the hard choices. We’re the monsters in every story so no one else has to be because we’re stronger than them and we can bare it,” Penelope recalled almost dutifully.

Those two sentences were summary enough, Penelope was sure, but the way her aunt was looking at her and biting her lip as if nervous, made the raven haired girl rethink that somewhat. Finally, Nonie sighed loudly and spoke up again.

“That’s part of it, but not all. Make no mistake, Shiny Penny, your Papa was telling you the truth, but he was also grossly simplifying what you would be expected to do here if you decide one day to stay in this coven and accept your apparent destiny.”

The sound came again, this time loud enough—because they were closer to it—to drown out parts of her aunt’s voice.

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack…

“What is that sound?” Penelope asked, looking around for something, anything out of the ordinary, but there was nothing.

“Something you need to see to understand. If you do ultimately end up staying in this coven and choose to pilot the dingy boat carrying our family into the future then you will need to know what that means and the only way to truly learn is to see something with your own eyes.” Nonie answered. “Follow me.”

Penelope did as she was asked. They crossed the grass on the inside of the round driveway in companionable silence, then over the driveway itself until they were walking towards through high grasses to the side of the estate. Walnut trees swayed in a line that they had to sidestep, a poor attempt to hide the buildings no one wanted to bother with tearing down, one of which, Penelope’s aunt seemed to be leading her to: the old carriage house.

The thwacking got louder the more steps Penelope took forward and then the hair on the back of her neck began to rise as her feet slowed to a full stop just feet outside one of the double doors.

The barn—for that’s really what a carriage house was only fancified—had been whitewashed once, but now flecks of paint clung sporadically to weathered planks that were grayish-brown in places where there was no peeling veneer. Penelope had explored the dodgy old building a number of times both on her own and with Paris as an accomplice. She knew the moldy rope on the old pulley that was tied to a rafter inside, which someone could climb—not easily—up into the loft where dusty boxes and trunks of detritus were stacked everywhere. From the loft, there was a shaky, thin wooden ladder that was nailed to one wall. The bottom floor beneath was hard packed earth with five or so old wooden stalls built into it that once held horses. Whatever great and impressive carriages used to live there when they weren’t transporting her ancestors all over the country, were long gone. Only a rotting one horse trap sat dilapidated in a corner. The rest of the place was just…sad and empty.

But it wasn’t empty now.

Penelope’s instincts were telling her to run from whatever fiasco she was being led into, but her mind was running her in all different directions. The part that controlled Penelope’s unhealthy sense of curiosity demanded that she keep going to see for sure whatever it was that was out of the ordinary inside, but the other parts of her calculating mind—the ones which had been conditioned and honed as sharp as any knife within the walls of the manor house—screamed that they already knew what was in the barn and that it was—like most everything else great and terrible in her upbringing—inevitable.

Fate or destiny or whatever—that thing that other people waste time they’ll never get back thinking about—wasn’t something Penelope questioned. From the moment she was born, the moment the elders had lit the sacred brazier and read who she would become in the amalgam of ashes and smoke, Penelope had been the unwilling puppet of fate.

And if the Greek myths that dictated the names of her family members taught a child constantly surrounded by them anything, it was that no living being—not even a god—could change what the Fates have in store for them.

So Penelope started walking again only stopping when Aunt Nonie reached for and pulled back the rusted sliding bar locking the doors closed and threw them both open wide. Inside, the interior was much as Penelope remembered it the last time she and Paris had been there, but there was an obvious difference. An electric hoist Penelope had never noticed before had been utilized and a wire rope hung taut, weighted down by the gambrel bar at the end where a man was tied expertly to the iron sides by both wrists. The man—no—the boy was being held two feet off of the ground with nothing to support him but his over stressed arms. One side of his face was stained dark red with blood that masked the matted black hair on his head, but it was his back that made Penelope’s stomach drop and bile rise into her throat.

His back looked almost like hard packed earth—the kind that a farmer tries to dig a plough through—furrows eventually forming, so deep and jagged that they couldn’t be ignored. The furrows in the boy’s back were just as deep, but they were also so caked in damp and drying crimson that Penelope couldn’t tell which wound all of that blood had come from or if he was even still breathing. Penelope stumbled back, the distance inadvertently giving her a better view of the boy’s face. She’d seen that face before in the clearing the day before with Maia. Bloodied and pale—Kjartan’s face looked more like his father’s when Achilles had tortured him—but the nose was slightly different and the eyebrows were more bushy than Galen Morell would ever allow his to grow.

“Kjartan?” Penelope said, as if uttering the name out loud would make this nightmare melt away somehow and she’d wake up in her bed ready to race Paris down to breakfast no matter how much it annoyed their mother.

The icing on the cake was her uncle Laomedon standing five feet or so behind Kjartan, winding a bullwhip around one massive forearm with a leather gloved hand. The sound of the doors creaking open had made Laomedon look up at who was coming and—for the briefest of moments—her uncle didn’t look like he knew what he was seeing or who. His mouth hung open in the most convincing imitation of a baroque relief sculpted into the side of an old European city fountain, but quickly his mouth shut and his eyes flashed a shear blue.

“What the hell? Nonie, what—why did you bring her here?!" Laomedon bellowed gesturing down at Penelope like she was a piece of furniture maybe, not an actual living breathing person standing right there in front of him.

Laomedon reached out with a righteous intrusiveness that not even Penelope’s parents used with her—zooming forward—hands clapping tightly over Penelope’s ears as he continued to curse out his sister until his face had gone so red that it was almost purple. Penelope struggled against the vice grip of the large hands holding her head in place. She watched her uncle and aunt bicker mutely until her uncle—seeming to actually forget she was there—let her go and Penelope’s struggling backfired on her, the unused momentum pushing her forward face first into the dirt.

Behind her Laomedon continued explaining to his sister why she was stupid and Penelope took the offered opportunity and stood, taking a few steps closer to Kjartan until she was standing a couple of feet in front of him.

“Kjartan?” Penelope called in an urgent whisper. “Kjartan? Wake up, Kjartan!”

Penelope reached out and shook the boy’s torso. It was warm—burning up in fact—so he wasn’t dead, but probably close to it thanks to the lashing he’s received. Seeing her sister’s boyfriend like this made Penelope’s stomach churn. He wasn’t a nice guy. He had choked her and might have really hurt Paris if Maia hadn’t stopped him, but there was no way that he deserved something like this.

No one deserved something like this.

Penelope remembered her father rapidly beating Galen Morell with his fist in their basement. Was this how Parks were expected to treat their enemies? Is this what would be expected of her one day? Making hard decisions, she knew she could do. Being a monster in someone’s story? Fine, she could even do that…but this? She could never and would never do this to another human being or supernatural or anything. She could never become that type of person, Fate be damned! And if destiny was determined to drag her down to the deepest, most depraved depths, then Penelope was going to fight with her whole body, her whole soul, and her whole heart.

“She’s Achilles’s favorite child!” Laomedon simmered, somewhat quieter than before, veins standing out on his tightly stretched neck as he pointed in Penelope’s general direction, angry gaze still fixed on Nonie who stood unbothered and unmoved, arms crossed over her chest as she waited for the tirade to pass. “She’s supposed to become the most powerful of his children! He wants her to succeed him as head of the family which—don’t even get me started on how I feel about that—but my point is, Achilles won’t tolerate this. If you think you’re on the skids with him now, you just wait until he finds out about this!”

“Are you finished?” Nonie asked, voice calm in the face of Laomedon’s angry, gasping breathes. “Listen, everything you just said is true, but it doesn’t matter what Achilles does to me. Penelope needs to understand what sort of decisions she will have to make one day if she stays here and decides to lead the family.”

“There’s no decision about it!” Laomedon wheezed, straightening up. “Fate is fate. It’s inevitable.”

Nonie shook her head, “Yes, but no. Fate is fate, you’re right about that, but fate couldn’t come about without the ability to choose. Our elders name us based on what they can see of our futures in the flames, but they can’t see the whole picture. Our choices fill in the rest of the puzzle pieces and I think we need to give Penelope the ability to see the kind of life she will have if she is to lead us, don’t you, big brother?”

Finally, Laomedon threw his hands up in the air, and marched back to Kjartan, throwing the whip in the dirt as Penelope stepped back. 

Somehow, the day had begun to come to a close without her noticing. The sky overhead was no longer the bright blue of the summer afternoon, but the purple-orange of dusk and all around crickets chirped and fireflies flared green in anticipation of the night. Laomedon seemed to realize the change in the time at the same moment as he clicked on a utility light that was hanging from a nail on the rafter ten feet from Kjartan’s side. The incandescent white light leant an eerie quality to the carnage that made Penelope feel like she was in a horror movie or maybe dreaming. She’d never had a nightmare like this, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be one, right? 

But the same instant Penelope thought that, she struck it down.

Nightmares didn't often have smell-o-vision and the coppery tang of blood in the air was so heavy that Penelope couldn’t smell or taste anything else in the oxygen she inhaled through her slack-jawed mouth. Her eyes followed a rivulet of blood as it ran down a strip of Kjartan's raw skin in quick zigzags like the winter melt down the side of a mountain. That seemed to be the final clue that brought home to Penelope just how real this moment truly was real. This was really happening. She was really standing in front of Kjartan Morell who—bully though he was—had been practically flayed cruelly and professionally in a matter-of-fact sort of way that her uncle had proceeded with as easily as if he’d been doing something equally mundane like starting a bonfire or cutting cleaning a dead deer.

This time when bile—acrid and hot—bubbled up Penelope’s throat, she couldn’t swallow it back down. Moving quicker than she ever wanted to, Penelope raced to the grass just outside the open doors, fell to her knees, and miserably emptied the few contents of her stomach. She heaved even when there was nothing to throw up. She heaved until her entire body ached with the stress of trying to jettison all of the trauma she’d just absorbed back into nature. When her stomach finally gave her a break, Penelope was whimpering and her skin was slick with sweat that made her feel cold all of the sudden even though her skin simultaneously felt like it was boiling against the refreshing coolness of the dirt beneath her hands and knees.

Penelope found that she didn’t even have the energy to move or get back up onto her feet even. In fact, if she was being completely honest, the only thing she wanted to do in that moment was to fall forward and embrace the coolness of the earth and the approaching coldness of the night. Once on the ground, the darkness would take her away and she could finally sleep and heal from this terrible nightmare.

But that didn’t happen.

Penelope’s pride would not let her fall down into a pool of her own vomit. Somewhere behind her, Laomedon continued his tirade as Nonie waited him out and Kjartan made no audible signs of consciousness. Thunder began to rumble in the distant sky on the farthest edge of their property. If Penelope had lifted up her head, she would barely have been able to tell the noisy clouds apart from the steadily darkening sky. There was no rain falling though Penelope would have said a prayer to whatever force that would listen in gratitude if it had been.

This dry thunderstorm was just one of the many that harassed New England in the age of global warming and failed human cooling, but this particular one was the first of the summer and it brought with it no cool breezes to caress Penelope’s slick face.

Dimly, Penelope registered her uncle and aunt go silent and that should have been a dead giveaway to her usually quick mind that the four of them weren’t alone anymore, but Penelope couldn’t think clearly enough to realize even that. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton as her ears began to ring.

Against every instinct she had, the raven haired girl raised her head and met the glowering eyes of her father standing directly in front of her. 


	10. Things We Don't Speak Of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First part is a flashback to Penelope seeing her father interacting with Galen Morell just after the events of chapter 1. It's been referenced enough, I figured it would make sense that it was included in here. The Second part after that is back in the main narrative in June 2021. Enjoy! :)
> 
> Pronunciations:
> 
> Achilles= A-kill-EES  
Laomedon= La-me-don  
Eumaeus= U-may-us  
Oenone = O-no-nee  
Kjartan = Kee-AR-tan  
Melusine= Mel-U-seen  
Device = Dev-is  
Deucalion = Do-K-lee-on  
Tithonus = Ty-tan-us

_September 2020_

_Penelope’s first and only adventure into the family wine cellar with her father and siblings had ended just the way it was supposed to._

_Achilles took charge of carrying the crate back up to the main house while Paris led them back up with the lantern. Penelope had to walk, which she could do well enough even though her knee still stung, causing her to limp after the rest of her family. After watching the younger girl struggle, Maia—for all of her earlier difficultness—offered to give her little sister a piggyback ride for the rest of the way. Penelope didn’t have to get down again until they were in the spacious front parlor of the manor where Penelope exchanged her sister for the scrutiny of their nanny and head housekeeper, Mae._

_“What’s all this then?” Mae asked kneeling so she could get a better look at Penelope’s knobby knees._

_Penelope shrugged, “I tripped.”_

_“Let’s get you all bandaged up,” Mae held out her hand and Penelope took it, allowing herself to be led through one of the dining rooms and into the kitchen where one of the major First Aid Kits was kept._

_After her knee was wrapped up so firmly in gauze that it was hard to bend, Penelope was released to go play with her siblings until dinnertime. She couldn’t find either Paris or Maia though. While descending down the backstairs used mostly by the servants, Penelope heard a snapping sound from below her. The raven haired girl followed the sound all the way down to one of the storage cellars. Wandering around the manor house was generally considered an unwise, but fun past time that Penelope had been repeatedly ordered not to do over the years._

_Her curious nature railed against rules and restrictions, however, so naturally Penelope had decided that such things didn’t apply to her and so she became not only the most independent of her siblings, but the most imprudent as well. The cellar’s heavy wood door hung ominously open on its hinges. A light was coming from somewhere below, but it wasn’t from one of those eco-friendly LED bulbs her mother insisted they use in every light fixture in the house. No, it was a warmer glow, perhaps from an oil lamp or a gas lamp?_

_Park Manor had originally been built in 1635 and hadn’t been outfitted with gas lamps sometime in the early 19th century and upgraded to electricity in 1912, but some of the lesser used rooms hadn’t been converted and had to be lit by an outside light force like an oil lamp or a hand held flashlight. As an adult, Penelope would come to recognize moments like this one as the part where you should run away if you want to survive a horror movie, but at 7 it was just one more unknown she could make known. So Penelope followed the unnatural light down the old stone steps. The stairway wound deeper than the girl had thought it would. This storage cellar was clearly not like the others._

_Stone came to an eventual end in a dirt floor and the walls were no longer of the same painstakingly carved Cherrywood panels that covered most of the walls of the first floor, but old dusty brown brick. Arches were carved out of the brick every five feet or so, perfectly shaped like gourmet Christmas cookies. Arches led to arches and more arches which turned into a labyrinth type warren of what seemed like separate pathways leading everywhere all at once._

_Rusted iron sconces hammered into the walls held small oil lamps that flickered, illuminating the space in an uneven mixture of light and shadow. Most children would be intimidated by this space, but Penelope knew a puzzle when she saw one. She’d always loved the tests and brain teasers her parents used to make her and her siblings work through. Her brothers, Deucalion and Paris would usually get frustrated and give up and then it would just be a race for time between Maia and Penelope to see who could solve the conundrum first and be rewarded. Maia won a lot, not necessarily because she was so much smarter than Penelope, but because she was older and had more experience working within the lines of their parents’ deceptions._

_Thwap._

_There the sound came again, echoing this time down to Penelope from somewhere much farther in the chamber than the raven haired girl was. Penelope perked up her ears and tried to place the noise so she could follow it._

_Thwap. Thwap._

_Penelope stepped lightly and carefully across the packed earth beneath her feet, coming to an archway that led to a proper corridor between two distinguishable walls._

_THWAP._

_The sound came again. This time much louder. Penelope knew she was definitely getting closer. In a display of self-preservation that was uncharacteristic of her imprudent spirit, apprehension began to creep into the girl’s chest. Where was she? Why wasn’t this part of the house one that she’d heard of or learned about in their family histories? What if she ran into a monster? What if she saw something she couldn’t unsee?_

_The brick passage narrowed further and the less and less frequent arches that led to pitch black places Penelope didn’t feel like exploring went from being open to being sealed with iron grated doors. At one point, the corridor dipped so that it wasn’t much larger of a space to fit through than Penelope was tall. Where ever she was going, one thing was clear, the person who’d carved out these chambers beneath the manor’s foundations hadn’t wanted trespassers finding their way to a place that was the sole domain of the head of the family. After crawling through a space that was hard even for Penelope’s tiny frame to get through, the girl was forced to jump down onto the dirt floor of yet another corridor that was much like the first brick one she’d entered and was normal sized again._

_THWAP._

_“You might think this is about you, Galen, but it isn’t,” her father’s voice reached Penelope’s ears. “This is about honor. Something you and yours know nothing about.”_

_THWAP._

_“Something your ancestors gave up the minute they broke the indentured contract to James Device and his family in the 1600s,” Achilles panted, voice raised and angry. “And it was something you lost all right to when your father took mine out for a ‘friendly’ after work nightcap only to stab him twenty-eight times in the back and throw his body in a river for us to find.”_

_Penelope scurried along the dirt towards the familiar and yet unfamiliar voice of her father. Achilles was a passionate man in that he—like most of his Park ancestors—wore his emotions on his sleeves, though he seldom gave them voice. But that made the small gestures of affection and pride he showed in his family that much more important to Penelope. He had a temper. He could go into rages when he and her mother argued, but those were few and far between these days, seemingly. Achilles was usually calm, steady, a grounding force for his children to look up to, but the man who was using her father’s voice, didn’t feel like her father. His voice was rough and broken, like something being dragged over shards of glass._

_She came to a final archway that looked down on a slight stairway of five stone steps which led to the wide open dirt floor of the chamber. At the center of it, a man was chained to a sturdy oak chair. He looked familiar to Penelope, but she couldn’t place him in her head no matter how much she tried. It was as if there was some sort of mental roadblock to her figuring out who this man was and what he had done. On one hand, she knew that she knew his identity, but it remained just beyond the reach of her mind’s eye._

_“Your father murdered my father with this knife,” Achilles said._

_Her father—no longer in his impeccably tailored waistcoat—paced around the man, brandishing a long curved blade that looked old and expensive, watching the man chained to the chair watching him. There was blood on the rolled backed sleeves of Achilles’s shirt, but the knife itself was clean. On the ground there lay and discarded leather and wood truncheon that had likely just been used as the bound man’s head, Penelope now took note, was dripping with blood from the temples. That had been was that sounds was._

_Her father—who she looked up to in all things—had beaten a man. Correction, was beating a man._

_Penelope had never seen Achilles physically hurt someone, not even in his rages. It made an unsettling feeling churn her stomach so Penelope watched her father lower the blade to rest against the skin of the other man’s neck._

_“I could slit your throat right now from ear to ear and God himself would call it justice.”_

_The man in the chair spat a red line in the dirt at Achilles’s feet, “It isn’t justice you’re doing this for though is it, Achilles? ‘The Parks are cold and ruthless,’ wasn’t just the beginning of a promising couplet rhyme, no, it was a warning to remind the world that anyone who crossed your ancestors would not live to regret it. What truly amazes me though, Achilles, is that you’ve managed to wait this long without giving away your plans ; biding your time all of these years. Patience is a virtue but it’s also something I would’ve expected more from your wife, not you. You’re impetuous, passionate, and hotheaded, but you’re not stupid, not enough to kill me when everyone above the age of three in our coven knows how much our two families loathe one another.”_

_For whatever reason, the brain block that had kept Penelope from being able to put a name to a face chose that moment to dissolve and a feeling of cold dread shot through the girl’s small frame like a shot of ice water in her veins._

_Galen Morell._

_He was the current head of the fifth and last magical bloodline in their coven. Each family in the Coven of the Five Pointed Star was unique in ability and reputation. The discrepancies between them all had been written out into poetic form by one of the coven’s more fanciful leaders, so easy that a child could learn it, and—indeed—all of the children of all of the families were required to know it by heart by the age of six. Penelope could still recall it line for line just from rote memorization:_

In the coven of the Five Pointed Star,

_Five families equal in power are._

_The Parks are ruthless and evil;_

_Crossing them is always lethal._

_The Elliots are fair and loyal;_

_And as helpful as pennyroyal._

_The Devices are sharp and cunning;_

_From their plans you should be running._

_Wealthy and steadfast are the Morells;_

_ They will pull you with them down to hell._

_The Le Mares are as changeable as the sea;_

_Be warned, better leave them be._

_These Five families equal in power are;_

_In the coven of the Five Pointed Star._

_The Morells—as they had been in the 1600s when the poem was first composed—were still the wealthiest of the five families, with the best political connections in the wider world. Penelope’s own family rivaled them in power and wealth, but not in influence. What pressed more urgently for Penelope’s consideration at the moment though, was the 400 year blood feud between the Parks and the Morells, which had culminated in this moment. The girl was drawn back to the present at the sharp cracking sound of Achilles’s fist connecting with one of Galen’s angular cheekbones. The man’s silver haired head snapped back and he was left reeling; trying with visible effort to remain conscious._

_“Do you know why we Parks are described collectively as the so called, ‘demon’s brood?’” Her father asked, his voice so calm and even now that it was almost toneless._

_Galen tried to lift his head up, but it fell back against the wooden headrest behind him as he murmured something Penelope couldn’t hear and struggled against the bindings around his wrists and ankles._

_“Can we speed this up please?” asked a bored voice that Penelope immediately shrank away from._

_Deucalion Park or ‘Leo’ as the family called him. He was Penelope’s eldest brother, Maia’s evil twin, and the bane of Penelope’s modest seven year existence. Penelope hadn’t noticed him in the room up until now, but there he was; tall and lanky, leaning against the cold brick wall behind Galen, grimacing as the latter gasped for breath as blood from his nose ran into his mouth. Their father didn’t acknowledge Leo right away either._

_Instead, he drew a cloth from his pocket and gagged Galen with it before he could recover and add his two cents to the discussion. Then Achilles turned around to meet Leo’s expectant gaze, green eyes glinting with dangerous lines of gold as he tightened his jaw._

_“Quiet,” he ordered firmly. “It’s time you make yourself useful for once, Deucalion. Prove to me that you’re actually my son and deserve my love not just some unfortunate abomination like the seers predicted at your birth.”_

_Achilles tossed the curved knife to Leo, his expression full of contempt which Leo—in his insecurity—reflected like a mirror as he caught the blade. Penelope’s father liked all of his children well enough most of the time; loved them even sometimes, but for as long as Penelope could remember, Achilles had always treated Leo differently as though there was something about the boy that offended him personally and had done so from the moment Leo plopped out of their mother. Achilles was ten times harder on Leo than any of his other children including Maia and he made no secret to the world that he despised his eldest son—partially because of what Leo was and partially because their mother loved Leo best, though how Nora could love him was beyond Penelope as Leo was the kind of boy who went out of his way to make himself notoriously hard to care for._

_Leo was after all—a natural born Necromancer—the rarest of all specialized witches in the world. Why Leo was born a necromancer. Hadn’t been immediately clear, not even to the seers at his birth. They’d apparently glimpsed both “light,” and “dark,” in their vague flashes of the future and that was it before they’d named the twins._

_Specialized witches were only born into certain bloodlines—usually those with a unique supernatural inheritance or those who were cursed—and the bloodline of Melusine—the demon countess whose blood ran through the veins of every Park witch—was no different in that respect. Generally, out of all of the children the leader of their family had, only one of them would be born with an equal affinity for all types of magic. In his generation, it had been Achilles. In Penelope’s, it had been Penelope herself with Paris as a close second—though his talents leaned towards light and healing magic—he could so far do everything that Penelope could, just not always as easily or as well._

_Maia was a Greenwitch—her magical affinity was to Earth Magic and all things living—which was the opposite of Leo—whose doomed affinity was to all that was preternatural and all that was dead. Nora too though came from a unique magical bloodline and it was that—in the end—which had caused Leo to be born so…strange. Penelope’s Javanese grandmother was descended from a line of “shamans” who had lived their lives over the centuries largely as traditional and spiritual healers—using their magic to better the communities in which they survived and thrived—but in the beginning they had been powerful chieftains. At one point, the leader of their family had been a boy who was tuned into all natural forces equally. His family had called him Semeru and he had changed the fate of all magic in the isles between the Indian and Pacific oceans._

_According to the story Grandpa Device had told them, Necromancers were common back in ancient times. Why, no one knew, but—unlike their counterparts—necromancers were associated with all things dark and harmful. People then were believed to have two souls: one that left the body at the time of death and one that was more of a ‘lifeforce’—something which could come and go thereby strengthening or weakening an individual creature. If a person was ill, it would be assumed that the sick person’s lifeforce had left them because it had been scared off perhaps by another soul or by a malicious spirit which could’ve come from anyone and anywhere._

_But when bouts of uncommon misfortune such as babies and their mothers both expiring in childbirth or a man in his prime suddenly keeling over with his heart seizing in his chest, it was thought a Necromancer was tampering with the souls of the local community and unleashing malice just because they could. Semeru—a direct ancestor of Nora—had found a way to bind the forces that made necromancers to his own bloodline by using all of his power to do so. From then forward, a necromancer would only ever be born in that part of the world into Semeru’s family and—on the rare occasion that a necromancer was born—that baby could be disposed of directly after birth before they could hurt anyone, thus ensuring there would be no more necromancers to hurt the local community, but such plans seldom went smoothly._

_Mother Nature abhors people who try to meddle in her affairs._

_Necromancers—like all other living beings—were Nature’s children and when Semeru bound them to his bloodline so they could be snuffed out of existence at his beck and call, Nature had fought back and built in a loophole that wouldn’t allow newborn necromancers to be slain when they were small and vulnerable. Hence forward, any necromancer born into Semeru’s bloodline would be just one born into a set of twins. One twin would be ‘good, or ‘normal,’ and the other would be shrouded in darkness from day one._

_Nature stacked the deck so that while the ‘normal’ twin lived, the baby necromancer would remain alive, thriving as any other human child. If someone tried to kill it, then the necromancer would be able to come back from death because their soul was tethered to that of their twin in the world of the living. But once the necromancer’s twin died, both siblings would be separated eternally. The soul of the dead twin would remain in the otherworld, acting as an anchor to that of the necromancer. From that moment on, the necromancer would be hollowed out—human only in form--their humanity slowly receding and leaving nothing behind but a living corpse bound to walk the world forever until it fell apart and returned to nature as all things did. Only if the necromancer’s twin killed them, would death for the necromancer—and their twin—be permanent, but that was never something either twin had been able to do to one another in the history of Nora’s family._

_To Penelope, Maia was more than just a counterbalance for Leo’s darkness, but the two of them were irrevocably linked in a way that none of the other Parks were and theirs was a bond that no one else could really understand. To Nora though, Leo was the special one and his specialness was probably what made him seem more valuable in her labyrinth mind, but to Achilles, his eldest son being born so limited in power had been a huge blow to his pride. Achilles bullied Leo whenever he could which—in turn—was why Leo was such a bully to Penelope and Paris. Knowing that, Penelope could almost feel pity for him._

_Almost._

_Leo pushed away from the wall and stepped into the center of the room. He removed his plain black t-shirt to reveal an unruly litany of black tattoos spread across a tan narrow chest. They weren’t like anything even the most skilled tattoo artist would come up with. If Paris could be trusted—which was not a lot in Penelope’s opinion—Leo had been born with some of the easy black swirls pre-written into his skin in a language none of the living spoke and the rest of the marks had appeared as though burned permanently into his skin every time a new ability associated with the special magic he was born with made itself known. Because of the Park family’s…unusual supernatural beginnings, something peculiar happened within each successive generation of Park children. In every new batch of the ‘Demon’s Brood,’ only one of them would be born with the powers of a full witch meaning they were able to communicate with and manipulate all forms of magic. The rest of the full witch’s siblings would be born with the ability to manipulate and control only one specific form of magic expertly._

_Maia had her earth magic and, Paris, so far, was a general witch with talents similar to Penelope’s, but—according to the prophecies made at his birth—that didn’t matter because his powers would be lost to him before he grew into a man and Leo was the rarest of all: a Necromancer. He was the first of his kind to be born into Nora’s side of the family in a thousand years and no one had been ready for him to be born as what he was. No one had wanted to think about or accept that one day—after Leo had died enough times—he would basically be just a living corpse, an ‘abomination,’ with the ability to manipulate other corpses. Right now though, Leo was fourteen year old mortal boy and the only visible expression of his magic that made him stand out from his siblings were the tattoos that appeared sporadically on his body every time a new facet of his magic was unlocked._

_Penelope—on the other hand—was what her father been hoping for all along. She was the ‘full witch’ of her generation. Scrying at the time of her birth had predicted that she would be powerful and that she would be her father’s heir magic-wise. Achilles was not the oldest of his five siblings. He was—in fact—the second youngest, but he was the only full witch among them and therefore the most powerful. His power and magical talents were what had made Penelope’s father the de facto head of their family just as Penelope was expected to be one day. But Penelope didn’t want that. Granted, she had no idea who she was going to grow up to be, but whoever it was, it would be of her own choosing, not divined by some fortune-teller great-grandmother and certainly not dictated by the amount of magic running through her veins. No one else cared what Penelope thought or felt about the matter though. To Achilles she was his heir and in turn, also the favorite of his children, which was perhaps why Leo hated her so much, Penelope reflected solemnly._

_Leo—as a necromancer—would resurrect every time he died, no matter the means, and could kill and revive people at will—something he loved demonstrating to and on his siblings as often and as painfully as possible—especially on Penelope._

_“What are you waiting for?” Achilles goaded Leo impatiently. “Summon the demon.”_

_Leo let out a loud exhale of air and dropped to his knees, holding the knife out in front of him in both open palms as if it were somehow something sacred and not the weapon that had been plunged multiple times into their grandfather’s back before his body had been thrown into a river. Then Leo closed his eyes and started to chant in a guttural language that wasn’t the normal language they used for spells, nor was it in their Grandmother Device’s mother tongue, but one Penelope didn’t understand. The black tattoos across his skin seemed to pulse and glow an angry red as the temperature in the chamber dropped so much that Penelope could see her own breath condensing in the air right in front of her face._

_Suddenly, Leo stopped chanting and—drawing the curved knife from its scabbard—he plunged the blade into the center of his chest in one fluid motion. Penelope gasped. Leo’s eyes—normally black—had been shot through with slants of deep red, but in the moment the knife slid into his chest, they flickered back to black depths full of momentary pain and confusion. He stopped chanting and breathing. Then Leo’s black eyes grew glossy as he fell back onto the dirt, dead as a doornail. Blood bloomed up from the wound around the knife, flooding the hollow of his diaphragm before spreading out like the roots of some insidious plant to flow down onto the packed earth floor._

_For a few moments, Penelope forgot how to breathe. She was surprised at the sudden tears that had surged into her eyes at watching her own brother take his own life. Sure, he was a bully who’d killed and resurrected her at least three different times and had never once shown her an act of kindness that wasn’t self-motivated, but Leo was still her brother. He’d never killed himself in front of her before nor had Penelope watched anything or anyone die right in front of her eyes. She knew Leo would resurrect in a handful of minutes, but even that knowledge didn’t take away from the hollow ache in Penelope’s heart at the sight._

_Achilles Park though looked completely unmoved by the death of his eldest son. Instead, he was acting as if he were waiting for a bus to arrive or a cake to bake, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at the face of his expensive Timex watch on one wrist. Leo’s blood continued to seep into the hard packed floor. The only change in the minutes that followed was that the knife—seemingly with a will all of its own—pushed itself out of Leo’s chest and onto his abdomen, causing a new pulse of red liquid to well up as his still dead body rejected the foreign object so it could begin to heal._

_Then—like thunder in a storm—there was a sudden cracking sound, then a blinding flare of scarlet light that Penelope had to close her eyes against. When the raven haired girl opened them again—in addition to seeing purple spots—Penelope not also saw…a woman? The girl rubbed her eyes and did a double take._

_Yup, a beautiful woman who looked relatively young and wasn’t there before was definitely standing in the spot Leo had previously stood in. She wore a dark long cloak which obscured everything, but her face, hands, and feet from view. Her eyes were green-gold, glowing like embers from within as she took in the scene around her._

_There was no way in hell…_

_“Melusine?” Penelope whispered to herself._

_The words had passed her lips before she’d thought to stop them and—though her father had not heard them—the demon countess had. Those gold-green eyes rose and zeroed in on Penelope where she was standing at the back of the room._

_“Who summons me to the death of one of my descendants when there is neither power or a soul to take in return? You, girl. Come over here.”_

_The voice was deep and raspy, but just as startling and unavoidable as a bell. Penelope’s entire body seized up as she stood completely still. Something within her was telling her to do as she had been commanded, but Penelope’s muscles refused to carry her. With an odd mix of fear and ambivalence, Penelope remained standing, back flat against the wall and just stared back at the demon countess with wide, fearful eyes._

_Achilles had been surprised when Melusine had failed to acknowledge him—as though he were not even in the room—and he’d followed her focus as it moved behind him and settled upon his youngest daughter._

_“Penelope?” Achilles called, surprised. A myriad of emotions flashed across his face: disbelief, curiosity, anger, and finally fear. “Penelope, stay right there. Don’t move!”_

_He turned back to Melusine and circled her so that he was blocking Penelope from the demon’s view._

_“I summoned you here, using the lifeblood of my son, a necromancer because…I need a favor.”_

_Penelope swayed on her feet, only able to see half of the woman’s beautiful, yet enraged face over her father’s shoulder._

_“The nerve,” Melusine admonished coldly. “You are my descendant. My blood gives you your power, boy. I owe you nothing.”_

_“You’re wrong,” Achilles countered._

_To Penelope’s surprise, her father didn’t flinch or cower at the sound of the woman’s rasping voice. The temperature in the room—which had been cool before—now dropped so that Penelope could see the breath sneaking out through her fingers coalesce into a mist that floated in front of her for only a second before dissipating. Her skin felt like it did whenever she dipped an ungloved hand into a snowbank, so cold that she might as well have been one of the popsicles in their icebox, but her father didn’t shiver like she did and Penelope would never understand how he managed not to when it was like they were suddenly in the artic._

_“You,” Achilles said, pointing at the demoness in a way that made her glowing gaze narrow as she watched him. “Need me and my siblings and my children. Our power at our deaths is what fuels your immortality. You feed off of it instead of allowing it to dissipate back into nature. A Park hasn’t died since my father and you…you must be feeling a little drained. However, if you grant me what I ask for, I will give you half of my power here and now so you won’t have to wait for me to grow old and kick it in a hospital room someplace.”_

_“Time,” Melusine rasped dangerously. “Is no mortal’s to bargain.”_

_“But my life is,” Achilles countered calmly. “I can choose to give you some of my power now in exchange for a favor or you can refuse, slink back to that cave of yours in Provence, and wait maybe a hundred years or so for me to die of natural causes.”_

_Melusine eyed Penelope’s father for a long moment. Her skin was as gray as the slate walls of the wine cellar had ben. She had feet not fins, which were firmly planted upon the hardpacked clay floor, apparently unbothered by the cold._

_“Bold of you to assume you will die of natural causes one day when you allow this kind of arrogance to dictate the choices you make,” Melusine warned._

_Something about her was lizard-like, Penelope realized. It wasn’t like the woman had scales or anything, but she was a force that felt misplaced: a powerful fish out of water mayhaps?_

_“Your daughter’s potential for power outweighs your own, Achilles Park. I think I’ll take her instead.”_

_Penelope’s knees buckled and her legs gave out beneath her as she fell to the floor and pressed herself as close to the wall behind her as she could. This demon—this woman—wouldn’t take her. Was Penelope scared? Beyond belief, but a fire burned in her chest that she knew would propel her to fight for all she was worth if Medieval Cher thought she was taking her away from her home and her family. As if her Papa would ever give her up or put her in danger…_

_“Fine, take her,” Achilles said, with a shrug, clasping his hands behind his back, but before Penelope could even pick her jaw up off of the floor where it had fallen open, he stepped closer to the demoness. “Oh, wait, you can’t, can you? If you could, you would’ve taken my power or my soul by now instead of taking part in this enlightening tête-à-tête we’ve got going on right now. You can’t harm your descendants. You can’t take what we won’t give you and I shall give you nothing if you do not do this one thing for me.”_

_The demon countess seemed amused by this._

_“You can’t live forever, boy,” she scoffed. “Nature will not allow it.”_

_“Not as a witch, but as a vampire, I could,” Achilles said, evenly. “And if that happens, you get neither my soul or my power. I may not be able to tap back into my magic, but—because I won’t be completely dead—you won’t be able to get at it either. “_

_Penelope’s father bent and retrieved the knife Leo had discarded and set the tip of the sharpened blade lightly against the skin covering his jugular vein._

_“Before absconding with this piece of human garbage,” Achilles nodded towards where Galen Morell was still tied, bleeding and unconscious to his chair. “I got a vial of blood from a vampire acquaintance of mine and drank it. Call it a little insurance policy incase this plan of mine didn’t go the way I wanted it to. Now, would you prefer, your demon loveliness, to risk losing a source of power so great that it could easily extend your immortal life for another century or so or give me—your charming mortal descendant—what I want?”_

_Penelope’s entire body felt boneless and yet as tense as a tightrope as she sat against the wall, waiting to see what was going to happen. Between unexpectedly being offered up as a sacrifice to her legendary supernatural ancestor which up until today Penelope had chosen to believe was just a character in some story and watching as her father let his hubris potentially get them all killed, Penelope’s little heart was beating in her chest as fast and as fragilely as a hamster. She’d never felt so small or been so captivated by anything in her life as she waited while the demoness scrutinized her father through the narrowed slits of her molten gold eyes. The green in them had evaporated at some point or had been overtaken by the gold while Penelope’s attention had been focused on her father._

_The knife tip Achilles held to his neck didn’t shake. Penelope’s father’s hand was sure and steady as he waited, holding eye contact with the woman who was the source of all of his volatile emotions and unbelievable ego. In hindsight, Penelope should have run far away once she’d discovered her father down here beating the ever-living tar out of his longtime rival, but she too had Melusine’s stubbornness and had inherited no small part of her father’s ego and she found that she couldn’t have run away at that moment even if she’d wanted to._

_“What do you want?” Melusine finally conceded, grudgingly. _  
_Achilles smirked and drew the knife back from his neck, but he kept a firm grip on the beechwood handle as she stood still._

_“I want you to enact a bloodline curse on this asshole,” Achilles nodded towards Galen again. “I want him and all of his children to live short, miserable lives. I want all of his grandchildren to die as soon as they enter the world of the living. I want my children and their children to be able to live free of the cancer that has dogged my family since we first set foot in this country in the 1600s. I want every living Morell in this coven to be the last living Morells in this coven.”_

_“If I give you this,” Melusine rasped, like a piece of sandpaper being slowly dragged against wood. “Nature may exact a price higher than you are willing to pay me. Bloodline curses are not small things. For all of that which is desired, much more must be given in recompence.”_

_Achilles shrugged his shoulders, eyes narrowing, “Price is no object.”_

_“Price may not matter to you, but have you considered the overall cost? Your children and their children may continue paying off the cosmic debt you are about to incur for as long as your bloodline continues. Is that something you are prepared to accept responsibility for?”_

_For the first time since Penelope had arrived, her father looked pensive for a moment, almost as if he were regretting everything he’d done up to this point, but Achilles never reconsidered. He left unfinished what he had started._

_“I accept,” Achilles intoned dully as if in resignation._

_Movement out of the corner of her eye, momentarily diverted Penelope’s attention from the freak out she would be having later about what all of this meant for her. Leo had come back to life. He’d scooted back across the floor and was now kneeling out of the way, shrugging back into his t-shirt without a scratch on him. His black eyes kept flittering back and forth between their father and the demoness which—if the wideness of his gaze was anything to go on—he was also seeing for the first time._

_When Penelope looked back at the demon, Melusine had pushed back one of the long, dark sleeves of her robe and was dragging one long talon-like nail over the gray skin there. The skin puckered and seemed to crackle open with a sound similar to ripping paper. In the resulting trench in the flesh, deep red blood welled up like oil from the earth. Penelope didn’t see her move, but suddenly Melusine was standing over Galen’s slumped former, the thick burgundy of her blood sluicing over his head. With her thumb, the demon countess drew a symbol in the red on Galen’s forehead, then stepped back._

_“It is done,” Melusine rasped. “Should any of your descendants wish to free themselves of your debt in the future, they must come to me.”_

_“..because the blood of a demon can break a bloodline curse. I know,” Achilles reminded himself with a roll of his eyes. “Don’t worry. Parks don’t run from what we’ve done. None of my descendants will seek you out after today.”_

_Melusine moved again. Achilles was forced to take a step back as she materialized directly in front of him and laid a hand over his chest, “Now you must give me what I am owed.”_

_Penelope had seen her father in pain before. For all of his physical graces and the way he fought and moved as fluidly as his godlike namesake, he stubbed one of his big toes at least once a week on something in some room. Penelope had watched him hop around on one foot and curse whatever furniture had moved itself into his way. She’d seen him cut himself by accident or smash his thumb with a hammer while trying to prove that he could be as handy as any man, but those had all been small hurts. A flash of temper and a string of curses later and Penelope’s father had been mostly back to his old self, but the kind of pain Penelope was witnessing right now…was nothing like that._

_Her father was screaming. It was almost an unhuman sound. He’d fallen to his knees, but Melusine’s hand still hovered over his chest like a magnet, her fingers hallowed in gold as Achilles contorted and wailed in her grip like a dying thing. When Melusine finally released him, he fell backward, collapsing with the heavy stillness of a bag of cement._

_“Papa!”_

_Penelope suddenly found her feet again and before long she was running unsteadily down the stairs to where her father lay sprawled out in the dirt, pale and still, so, so still. Leo got the same idea at the same time, kneeling on Achilles’s other side, the fingers of one hand checking the man’s neck for a pulse. Penelope had looked up then straight into the demon’s eyes. She hadn’t meant to do it, but something in her—some primal urge—demanded she find the source of the danger and either run or pull her father away from it as much as she could._

_The gold eyes were glowing only faintly now and the green was back in them now—specks of it sparkling like emeralds. One curved talon came to rest under the raven haired girl’s chin as if holding her in place. Then Melusine spoke, as rocks scrape against rocks, so were her words._

_“You and I will meet again.”_

_Then the specter of the woman faded right in front of Penelope’s eyes and she was left alone with an unconscious father, an equally surprised brother, and a groggy Galen Morell who was beginning to stir back into consciousness._

OOOOOOOOO

June 2021

In the beginning, there was only chaos. That much the Greeks and almost every other mythos developed across the world got right, but what comes after is more hazy. For witches though, what came after chaos wasn’t as important as what chaos itself was. Chaos was and is the stuff of life—nature, substance, elements, particles, natural and unnatural forces—all of it wrapped up into one messy package. And out of chaos there was born magic in all of its various forms. Magic—like chaos—never takes the same forms in all places at all times, but it is one entity. One force that could be tapped into and manipulated by certain beings. Originally, these beings were called witches or enchanters because of the miracles they wrought out of nothing, but magic would not be limited or contained so easily not even by one of its own tenants—nature. Those magic sensitive beings eventually fell under an umbrella term that was meant to encompass them all—‘Supernaturals’—most of which could genetically pass on their predisposition to the magic on to their offspring and so on and so forth.

‘The Magic’—or the, “Big M,” as Paris termed it—flows through everything and must be at all times respected an obeyed. When the Magic was neither respected nor obeyed, then that moody landlady Mother Nature would came along and only bad things followed from there. Things that humanity couldn’t imagine like bloodline curses and blood feuds between covens that lasted millennia and dictated the lives of so many innocent others...

For a reason she could not put into words, Penelope felt as though her body was the pincushion where the consequences of her family’s collective sins had come to roost and she was the only one made to pay the price.

Penelope looked and felt more wretched than she could ever remember feeling in her entire life as she knelt on the ground, Achilles’s eyes alternating between looking at her and shooting daggers at her Aunt Nonie who stood firm beneath the obvious disapproval. The cold realization that she might be punished now settled into Penelope’s stomach, increasing her misery even though she technically knew that she wasn’t at fault here and was unlikely to actually be berated at all.

It was Nonie who better start running for the hills—but being a Park and a Park woman at that—her aunt stubbornly stood steadfast in defiance of all of her instincts which were likely screaming at her to think of her own self-preservation.

There was no informal standoff though between brother and sister now like there had been earlier that morning when Aunt Nonie had appeared out of nowhere. Instead, Penelope felt hands lifting her up beneath her arms and setting her back down on her feet. Her father dusted off her legs, then stood back up to his full height, and lifted her backpack from her shoulders. Finally, Achilles held his hand out to Penelope to take. Then—taking stock of how pale and drawn she was—Achilles seemed to think better of it and knelt down, lifting the little girl into his strong arms much like he had done in the wine cellar all those long months ago when she’d scraped her knee and seen the mosaics lining the stone walls depicting all of the Greek myths that inspired her ancestors’ names.

This time though, Achilles didn’t march immediately back to the house like a soldier on a mission. Instead, he turned around, looking to his siblings—who were both watching him to see what he would do—before focusing exclusively on Nonie.

“Walk back to the house with me,” Achilles ordered, but not unkindly.

Nonie nodded and followed them as Achilles picked his way through the tall grasses with Penelope in his arms. Most of the ride was smooth for Penelope, but on his walk down the ever so slight slope that led to the back door, Achilles almost lost his footing, tripping over a clod of dirt. The movement jostled Penelope and her stomach protested—threatening to rebel again. One of Penelope’s fists clung to Achilles’s blue button down shirt and the traditional navy waistcoat he wore over it.

“My tummy hurts, Papa. I don’t feel good.” Penelope whimpered pathetically, “I don’t feel good at all…”

Tears clung to the corners of her eyes. Penelope didn’t know how to feel right now—physically, emotionally, mentally—every piece of her had rallied together, taking up arms against the scene she’d just had to witness and on another level, she felt herself growing involuntarily concerned that the image of Kjartan strung up—mangled and bloody—painful chaos would never leave her. She also felt her pride smart at her use of the words she’d uttered to her father and the pitiful way in which she’d said them—knowing that such childishness was beneath her at this point in her life, after all she wasn’t 3—but the raven haired girl wasn’t feeling well enough at the moment to indulge her own self-consciousness. All of her energy was caught up in just trying not to throw up on Achilles’s chest.

“Shhhhh,” Her father cooed to her, settling his chin atop her head as he shouldered through the backdoor Nonie had opened for them. “Everything will be alright. I promise.”

Achilles took the back stairs into the kitchen two at a time. When he stepped into the kitchen, slightly breathless, Mae looked up from where she was kneading dough on one of the kitchen islands while one of the chefs bent low to put something in a glass pan into one of the double ovens.

“My daughter needs to be seen to,” Penelope’s father said, his authoritative voice gaining the attention of everyone in the large kitchen, much to Penelope’s embarrassment.

Penelope was aware that she must’ve looked terrible in that moment because Mae’s eyes widened and her face paled at the sight of her as she dropped the dough she had been working with on the countertop, but the raven haired girl couldn’t help it. She felt both warm and cold, her eyes stung, her throat and stomach burned with the corrosive recrimination of acid, and her chest was so tight that it made breathing somewhat difficult.

What was wrong with her? Was she dying?

Blinking away her surprise, Mae wiped her hands on a dishcloth and reached forward, enveloping Penelope into her arms without a word and carrying her swiftly into the laundry room adjoining the kitchen. Carefully, Penelope felt herself be set down onto her feet and guided towards a utility sink against one wall.

“Bend down, child,” Mae instructed gently.

Penelope did what she was told. She bent over the sink, hearing the faucet near her left ear being turned on. She soon felt Mae’s hands splashing cool water onto her face. A cloth was taken from a cabinet and dipped beneath the water, then wrung out before being laid on the back of Penelope’s sweaty neck. Carefully, Penelope felt herself being maneuvered over towards a wooden stepping stool beside the sink where Mae guided her to sit down heavily. A calloused hand remained tenderly holding the cloth to the back of Penelope’s neck.

“Put your head down between your knees and breathe, just breathe. That’s it, darling, settle down,” Mae said gently as her other hand began rubbing slow and comforting circles on Penelope’s lower back.

At some point, Penelope realized, she’d started to cry. Her breath hitched uncomfortably in her chest and she saw the tears that had been pricking at her eyes splatter onto the navy and white tiled floor in slow motion between her feet before her eyes grew blurry again.

“I’m sorry,” Penelope whispered.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mae said softly. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

A traditional footstool was taken from somewhere nearby and pulled noisily up beside of her as Mae sat down enveloping the Penelope into a side hug as she kissed the top of her head.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” Mae asked, mindful always of what the Park children needed even if when they didn’t know what that was.

Penelope wanted to say yes. She wanted to confess to Mae the horrible things she’d seen in the carriage house and how seeing Laomedon’s face in her mind suddenly made her feel sick and angry all at once. She wanted to tell Mae about her father and Galen Morell and to ask how her Papa could love her and still do such horrible things. How could those two sides of a person be mutually exclusive from one another? Penelope wanted to tell Mae about how she hated how her aunt had made her bare witness to Kjartan’s torture after befriending her and after they’d truly started bonding.

She also wanted to tell Mae how much she appreciated her caring, but also how much she wished that her mother was more like her instead of being so dispassionate towards her children every day of their lives as though they were business associates and not tiny humans in need of her care and affection. Penelope even found herself wanting to ask Mae if her parents even loved her at all or if it was just an act because the elders had predicted that she would be more powerful than her siblings and that made her useful somehow in everyone’s story but her own.

Instead though, Penelope just shook her head, internalizing everything she wished she could let go. Pathetically she sniffled and wiped sullenly at her probably red and puffy eyes.

“Do you want me to walk you up the stairs to bed?” Mae asked, feeling Penelope’s forehead for fever and not looking satisfied that the girl was all of the sudden well again. “I can make you some broth. A good rest should help everything else.”

Penelope shook her head. Instead, she wiggled out of the housekeeper’s grasp, standing and hanging the damp cloth from her neck on the side of the sink. Quietly, she thanked Mae, gave her a brief hug, then Penelope shuffled out into the kitchen and the main corridor beyond without meeting anyone’s eyes. All she wanted was to shrink down to the size of an ant and disappear and never have to interact with the outside world ever again, but Penelope knew better than to hope that such a solace could be something that she could have. Instead, she needed to get her mind out of the hopeless pit it’d condemned her to and back into working order.

Somewhere ahead of her, Penelope heard the opening of a door and when she raised her head she saw her Aunt Nonie’s side profile before she disappeared into a room, that same door closing behind her. The door itself was unique from the ones in the hallway around it. It was Moorish in design—squares carved into the oak surface symmetrically from top to bottom—and had been installed in the 19th century as the entrance to the “Turkish” den where Penelope’s father like to read and rest and be alone.

Suddenly, Penelope knew how to get her mind off of what she’d just suffered: indulging in her favorite past time.

Spying.

Quickly, she slid down the hallway ahead of her, almost wiped out around a sharp corner, and then climbed the narrow stairwell there up to the second floor on all fours. She only stood once she’d reached the top and stealthily looked over the lip of the top step to make sure no one was around to see her. Sure now that she was alone, Penelope bolted up and followed the banister around the landing it protected and came to the end of a short, narrow corridor leading to three walls and three old, old doors.

One of the benefits of living in an old house that was constantly being renovated, was that there were parts of the house that were retained only in the memories of one departing generation and completely forgotten by the rest. The three largest overhauls ever done on Park manor had happened in the last three centuries at random intervals. The main manor house itself had been built in the 1600s, then rebuilt after a fire in 1780, and finally renovated for around the last time at the tail end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. All of the newer corridors , rooms, and staircases were larger and had been built around the pre-existing structure. Because of this, any stupidly brave souls who successfully navigated the first floor and wanted to explore the house deeper—of which there were fewer and fewer as time went on—quickly got lost in the warren of competing passageways, sudden dead ends, and rows and rows of doors that seemed to just keep going in apparently random directions.

Penelope though had made it a priority to master the layout of all floors of the house. She’d even gone so far as to copy the most recent blueprints in crayon from a book in the central library, adding an orange dot to every unoccupied or forgotten room that had a floor vent in it that looked down upon one of the sitting rooms or a communal room like the kitchen. These so called, ‘best spying places,’ were the raven haired girl’s most successful forays into her strategy of, ‘spying smarter not harder.’ The absolute best thing about those little hideaways though was that Penelope—to her knowledge at least—was the only one in the family who knew of their existence, which made the girl feel a sense of pride that not even her mother could diminish.

With effort, Penelope pushed all of her bodyweight against one door in particular, managing to slowly creak it just open enough for her to walk into.

The once bedroom in the original part of the house had been relegated to storage once the more modern wings had been built and it was filled to the gills with human detritus: antiques, moldy papers, musty boxes, stacked chairs, tables, and everything in between. Focused on the prize now, Penelope dropped to her knees and army crawled between the eight wooden legs of two sets of chairs until she’d emerged into the cleared space that she had laboriously arranged so that she could lay just over the old Victorian cast iron grate that peeked down into the same den her aunt and—presumably her father too—had disappeared into.

Opening the dampeners, Penelope’s eyes adjusted to the dim orange glow in the room. When Penelope looked through the cast iron Victorian grate, she could just see her aunt sitting in an upholstered leather chair which—Penelope knew from experience—was not so comfortable as it looked. It took a few moments, even with the dampeners open to judge where her father was in the den, which appeared to be lit only by the first someone had stoked to life in the fireplace. Her father was standing to the side of the fire itself, leaning against the mantelpiece which was almost directly below her. She could hear the quiet rumble of her father’s deep voice, but not the words he said. Thankfully neither did Penelope’s aunt it seemed because she asked him to repeat his question so he did, this time loud enough for the second floor spy to decipher.

“A drink, do you want one?” Achilles articulated calmly, holding up the old fashioned tumbler glass he’d already filled more than halfway full with amber liquid from the decanter on the mantle near him.

Nonie shook her head, crossing one leg over the other and her arms over her chest in the same breath, “No thanks. Seems like I’m not as much of a lost cause as you expected me to be.”

Achilles threw back the contents of his glass, swallowing the alcohol in one swift gulp before setting the empty glass on the mantle and wiping his mouth uncharacteristically on the tailored French cuffs on one wrist of his shirt.

“I don’t have any expectations of you anymore, Nonie.”

“If only you’d said those words to me when we were kids, I might’ve stayed here and lived the mundane little life you wanted for me,” Nonie smiled ruefully as she spoke, but Penelope could see that the gesture didn’t reach her aunt’s dark eyes and the edges of her mouth—If Penelope eyes weren’t deceiving her—seemed to be straining slightly to hold the expression.

“You know, I still exchange written correspondence with Diane and Ed Saltzman regularly,” Her father admitted almost absently.

“Good for you?”

Nonie raised both of her eyebrows as if to say, ‘so,’ which was exactly what Penelope had to work to keep herself from asking out loud, but before she could slip up, her father continued.

“They tell me that Ric still asks after you now and again in those rare moments of clarity where he remembers to call them back at all,” Achilles said.

Her father was staring into the flames and didn’t seem to be worried about his proximity to them. Nonie just shrugged her shoulders, head cocking to the side.

“Well, yeah,” She answered like Achilles was dumb. “Why wouldn’t he ask after us? You, Laomedon, and Uli became as close to him as brothers and it isn’t as if we only spent a week in their home. They kept us—or at least me—for close to a year before that dusty old fart, Dunstan Device came to claim you guys.”

“No, Nonie,” Achilles corrected with a glare that was shifting onto his older sister. “Ric doesn’t ask about, ‘us.’ He asks about you specifically.”

At this, Penelope’s aunt let out a loud, long sigh, closed her eyes, and bit her lip. After a pregnant pause between the siblings, she finally spoke up.

“What do you want from me, Achilles?” Nonie asked, her tone tired. “I was 14 and we all know 14 year olds don’t make the best decisions on their own. Exhibit A would be me circa twenty years ago and exhibit B is that boy Laomedon has hanging from a wire in your barn.”

Achilles laughed humorlessly, turning his back to the fireplace as well as to Penelope who could no longer see his stern expression, but could imagine perfectly its ferocity, “So was Ric or did you forget? Do you ever stop to think about what you did to him? Do you have no shame?”

“Okay, hold on just a fucking second,” Aunt Nonie said loudly, springing to her feet in righteous indignation. “First of all, how the fuck dare you. Second, I was not the sole participant in our activities back then so the blame for their repercussions doesn’t rest solely on my shoulders, let’s just make that clear. Third, we were kids, Achilles! Why the hell does any of it matter now like twenty something years later?”

Penelope watched as her father took a few short steps closer to her Aunt so they were close enough to stare one another down. She still couldn’t see his face, but when he spoke it sounded like he was clenching his jaw.

“Have some self-respect!”

“I do!” Nonie matched him, “And apparently I’m the only one. Christ.”

“You were the man’s first love, Nonie! And the first girl he ever slept with. Would it have been too much to ask for you to acknowledge the profound repercussions you’ve had on his life or—at the very least—to say goodbye before you ran away with his heart like a thief in the night?!”

They were both shouting now, not at all concerned apparently about who could overhear them.

“Oh, yeah blame me!” Nonie fumed, eyes having shifted from gray-green to Melusine’s gold-green with the arrival of her anger. “It’s not like you had the resources and wherewithal to support a 14 year old sister who was knocked up, did you, little brother? As to my leaving Ric and the rest of you boneheads behind, you only have yourself to blame for that just like every other awful thing that happens in this damn place. You were the one who sent me packing the minute I told you that I might be pregnant you sanctimonious prick!”

“I was a child, younger than you, even.” Achilles defended himself, “I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t prepared to shoulder the weight or the responsibility of leading a family back then, but I had to because the last thing Mama said to me before she was killed was to, ‘take care of your brothers and sisters,’ and in failing that, I failed you.”

“You’re a coward,” Nonie said, eyes glistening, but no tears fell. “You sent me away—your own flesh and blood—not because you were overwhelmed, but because you were afraid that Diane and Ed might throw us out on the street and—worse—Dunstan Device wouldn’t take us in if he knew that your older sister had a half-human bun in the oven that he would be responsible for to the council. Admit it, little brother. You hung me out to dry so you and Laomedon and Uli and Narcissus didn’t end up back on the streets!”

For a moment, Penelope’s father leaned forward against the mantelpiece, his face completely obscured by his hunched shoulders which were casting shadows over his head. Achilles’ body seemed to be shaking, but Penelope couldn’t confirm it for sure until her father propped himself back up and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand as he turned back around towards his sister. His face wasn’t as deep a red as it usually was when Achilles had one of his outbursts and to Penelope, he just looked sad.

“I made a mistake. I would take it back if I could, but I can’t” Achilles confessed, softly, voice breaking. “I don’t expect you to forgive me ever, but you should know that I truly am sorry. Forgive me, but I have to ask: what—what happened…to the baby?”

Nonie bit her lip again and looked away, towards the blue stained glass window with its Moorish design that gave the room its decorative inspiration. She took in a deep shuddering

Finally, she said softly, “I was a girl alone on the streets. I spent my nights in shelters if I was lucky, and my days begging in parks and on stoops. I ate maybe one meal a day; usually something from a trash can somewhere which I don’t suppose is conductive to good pre-natal care. Life was hard and I miscarried about a month after I left the Saltzman’s. It was for the best really. You of all people know that I’m not mother-material. Even I know that no child deserves to be born into that level of neglect and hardship”

“But Alaric is father material,” Achilles offered up, as though filling his sister in on Alaric’s later life would make up for part of his faults. “I know you didn’t come to my wedding because you didn’t want to run into him. He brought his wife at the time with him. She wasn’t a great woman apparently, but he did marry again, someone he loved truly. She died though—tragically—leaving him with two beautiful twin girls who are more than a fit legacy for him. Perhaps, it’s time you met them?”

“I—I’m happy for him, but I don’t think that would be a good idea. I’m an independent woman after all, free to do as I chose, go where I want, love whom I want, and kick ass through all of it,” Nonie was smirking now, attempting to lighten the mood in the room which had gone as dark as a midnight sky during their argument, “but I also have to do what’s best for me.”

Achilles nodded, sniffling, “That is your right.”

Rethinking their conversation, Achilles stepped forward and suddenly knelt down in front of Nonie and met her eyes. Now, Penelope could only see a narrow side profile of his face, but it was enough for the raven haired girl to realize that she was seeing a completely different side of her father. All of the traits that he had been named for had seemingly melted away for a moment, leaving this shadow of a man that Penelope had trouble recognizing as her father. He looked so…small and defeated and the sight made Penelope’s stomach churn uneasily as some echo of her earlier anxiety returned to her body.

“I was wrong when I sent you away. It was—it is—also unfair of me to blame you for being the catalyst in Ric’s tragic romantic life. I long ago let go of the notion of having him as a brother-in-law—though I admit that I entertained that dream for more years than I should have—but he’s basically family nonetheless. But you, my dear sister, _are_ my family. You deserved all of my love, loyalty, and understanding at a time in your life where neither of us knew how to survive in a world where our parents weren’t there to guide us. I am—and will forever remain—sorry for everything I said and did that hurt you as well as everything I didn’t do that I should have. You did and do deserve so much better in your life and I need you to know that I will always love, cherish, and respect you—as will every other member of this family—despite whatever relationship you might chose towards us going forward.”

“Jesus,” Her aunt cursed wetly. This time it was because of the tears she couldn’t keep from falling and the fondness—despite everything—that she still obviously felt for her little brother. “To be honest, Achilles, I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive you for what you did to me…but I will try. Christ, with the number of tears we’ve shed in this room in the last thirty minutes you’d think one of us were dying.

“No such luck. Pretty sure you’re stuck with me for the foreseeable future,” Achilles smiled. Slowly, he leaned forward—giving Nonie time to punch or slap him if she wanted to—but when she didn’t he pulled her to him in a firm hug. When he spoke again, his voice reminded Penelope more of a little boy than of the authoritative father she knew. “I’ve missed you so much, big sister.”

“Damn you for making me cry,” Nonie’s voice cracked as more tears fell, but she returned the hesitant embrace just as warmly, one hand patting Achilles’s back. “I’ve missed you too, you little shit.”

Penelope heard her father’s chuckle as he pulled back, but he didn’t stand up, holding Nonie’s hands in his own.

“I swear on our parents’ names though,” Nonie added seriously. “That if you ever toss me or any of your kids out in the dirt for the same reasons as before, I will end you, and not quickly.”

Achilles nodded, agreeing, “It’s what I would deserve if I were that stupid twice in one lifetime.”

“The least of what you would deserve you mean,” Nonie corrected.

Achilles stood and moved to sit in the chair next to his sister’s.

“Speaking of just desserts,” Achilles said, clearing his throat before continuing. “I understand why you felt like you had to show Penelope what was being done to Kjartan, but educating my heir about what will be expected of her one day when I bite the big one is my responsibility, not yours.”

Nonie shrugged, nonplussed, “Figured you had it handled, but seeing as how you and I weren’t on speaking terms with each other until just now, I wasn’t able to confirm before the opportunity presented itself so I thought taking the initiative would be best. I know Penelope’s young yet, but you know as well as I do that a child in this house can’t remain innocent for long without becoming a liability to themselves and others. Besides, I don’t think Penelope’s destiny is as straight forward and traditional as you’re thinking it will be.”

Achilles’s dark brows furrowed and his eyes narrowed, “What do you mean?”

Nonie turned in her chair until her legs were thrown over one armrest and she was facing her brother completely.

“Do you remember the day that Penelope was born? While midwives from every family tried to keep your pissed off wife from setting fire to the entire manor because of how much pain she was enduring, the rest of us had been called to the mausoleum where the sacred brazier was lit. The second that kid slid wailing into the world, the fire that is always steady and robust flickered, almost pitching all of us into darkness for one moment.”

“So?” Achilles asked, slightly annoyed despite himself.

“So, I don’t blame you for not knowing this, little brother, but things like that don’t usually happen,” Nonie continued to explain passively. “It definitely didn’t happen when Laomedon, Uli, Papa, and me attended your naming ceremony. The flame they lit for you was full-bodied and so unwavering that the flames could have easily been painted into an artist’s masterwork, not fickle and crackling like real fire. In fact, so sure were Papa and Grandfather Tithonus of your future as a strong leader that they both spoke your name into being before Great X5 Aunt Sybil had even finished reading all of the portents of your future. But with Penelope, not only did the sacred flames flicker, but—aside from being able to see that she would be powerful—it took Aunt Sibyl considerably longer to read your daughter’s future clearly, almost as if it wasn’t set in stone. Like the trajectory would be something that couldn’t be pinned down.”

Achilles shrugged, not wanting to offend his sister after their reconciliation or to even entertain the thought that his chosen successor might not—in fact—succeed him at all, “Well, our how-many-times-Great Aunt Sibyl is old. She just turned 122 this year. Perhaps, the old bag is losing her touch? Ouch, hey!”

Achilles leaned away from his sister, rubbing the shoulder she’d kicked for his impudence, “Sibyl did not live to be a supercentenarian for you to be disrespecting her like that.”

But there was no malice in the admonishment and they both started laughing before long at the ridiculous turn their conversation had taken.

“I don’t care what anyone says about you, little brother. You’re good people.”

“Eh,” Achilles shrugged with a very un-humble grin. “I have my moments.”

“Speaking of,” Nonie continued, slouching back into the armrest behind her, “What are you planning to do with this Morell business? Torturing that tall glass of water in the carriage house can’t be the means to any end. You know that family above all wouldn’t just let something like torturing one of their sons—which is messed up because if Kjartan was a girl, we’d be able to pay them off with a blood price—but they’ll never settle for that when we’ve harmed one of their precious family jewels.”

“Actually—you probably haven’t heard—but I cursed Galen.”

“When?”

“A few months ago. Laomedon dry-gulched him on his own property and then tied him up for me in a chair in the crypt. Then I beat him as much as I dared and Leo performed one of his feats of necromancy to raise the demon countess and I asked her to curse him and everyone in his family going forward to have short and miserable lives.”

“Jesus…” Nonie whispered, looking at her brother briefly like he was a stranger she’d never met before. “Why?”

“What do you mean why?” Achilles asked, standing up and starting to pace a few steps back and forth. “You and I both know that this blood feud—which has been going for about four-hundred years or so at this point—needs to end. Our Papa tried his best by befriending Philippi Morell as a child, but not even his warm, genuine approach could do anything but leave the rest of us vulnerable to attack. The only way the feud will end is with a forced truce or the destruction of one or both of our families. I just made the hard choice and sped the timeline up a little is all.”

“Well, forget making peace then,” Nonie snorted, crossing one leg over the other on the armrest.

“What’s worse,” Achilles continued. “Is that I didn’t know that Maia had taken up with that Kjartan boy—who I am sure came onto her and only did so at his father’s urging so he could get close enough to murder us—and now she’s mixed up into all of it. I can’t help wondering if I indirectly cursed my own daughter when I had Melusine hex her dimwitted boyfriend’s family.”

“Where is Maia now?” Nonie asked.

“She’s been in her room all day. Mae said when she went up to bring her lunch, the breakfast tray she’d left outside the door hadn’t been touched and the door was locked,” Achilles said. Then he turned to his sister as if she could tell him something he couldn’t completely believe himself, “She’ll forgive me for this, right?”

Nonie shrugged, “What are you asking me for? I don’t make the rules...So…what did our demon nana ask for in compensation for cursing that pompous ass since you and I both know she can’t take anything useful from a necromancer so Leo’s safe-ish, but you? You’re the big fish, the most powerful Park in our generation. I can’t imagine you summoning her and not having to give anything in return.”

Achilles was silent for a few minutes, but the look his sister was giving him wasn’t something he could escape so he went with his instincts and told the truth, “She took half of my magic as payment.”

A steel-toed boot slammed into Achilles’s shin and he bent over in pain, “Ouch! Nonie!”

“Half? Half?! How are you simultaneously so smart and so stupid?"

“That hurt!”

“Good! It was supposed to! You of all people know that you are not invulnerable. Why would you do something that would make you and your family less secure?”

“To be honest, I didn’t think of it that way until later.” Achilles confessed, rubbing his knee. “At the moment, I was too obsessed with cursing Galen and immediately afterward I didn’t have time to think because Penelope saw the whole thing and I had to explain.”

“Hm,” Nonie hummed. “Perhaps it was a little hasty of me to assume you hadn’t shown Penelope anything that might be expected of her in future if she succeeded you.”

“You think?” Achilles quipped, glaring as he flopped down on the sofa on the opposite side of his sister’s chair, just out of kicking distance.

“How was I supposed to know that you’ve grown up into a responsible man during my absences?” Nonie countered, “Why’d you come out to the carriage house earlier anyway? Concerned Laomedon wasn’t being cruel enough?”

“No,” Achilles replied sharply. “I was getting out of the house so I could escape my father-in-law or hadn’t you noticed that Dunstans’s town car was parked in the circle drive when you got here?”

Penelope pulled back from the vent and pushed herself up into a sitting position, the rest of the conversation in the room beneath her becoming inaudible as she hugged her knees to her chest.

Grandpa Device was here? Why? Whatever the reason, it definitely wasn't good.

He hadn’t set foot into the manor in two years. Whenever Penelope’s mom or Penelope and her siblings saw him it was either at the compound or at his own estate. And—as if the thought of seeing her grandfather wasn’t enough to make Penelope’s body seize up in fear—the reminder of her father’s encounter with Melusine after he’d beaten Galen into unconsciousness in the crypt beneath the manor does the rest of the work pushing her towards breaking point.

She could remember how Melusine had looked once Leo had said the ancient incantation and plunged a dagger into his own heart, letting the siren call of his life’s blood seeping out onto the hard packed clay call the demoness forth to claim her dead descendant’s power, but her face had screwed up in rage when she’d recognized Leo and realized that she’d been duped all at once. Had Penelope’s father been a lesser man, Melusine’s glowing green-gold eyes would have burnt him to ash, but Achilles carried the demon countess’s blood and that had allowed him to stand his ground and broker a deal with her. When that was over, the demoness had turned away and her eyes had landed seamlessly on Penelope, pinning her in place.

_You and I will meet again._

Penelope couldn’t shake the words from her head as she retreated back out into the corridor, shutting the door to the darkened room behind her. Regardless, she needed to make some serious tracks between her and her grandfather. The farther away Penelope was, the better. Excluding that, all of the girl's remaining energy was going to filing everything she'd just heard into the detailed index in her mind for future use.

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts? Care to share? Thanks for reading this mess. :)


End file.
